8 introduction early childhood experiences and memories of ballet dancing. When I was eighteen months old, growing up in Africa, my mother and grand- mother took me to learn ballet dancing (Jacobson 2008). From then on until I was ten years old, I attended classes and even appeared in public performances in our town. My mother would tell me about how I would become famous and how she would sit in the special audience box and watch me dance. Thus, it became a childhood dream to one day perform on world stages. When I was ten, ballet dancing was suddenly taken away from me. I remember being told that I was becoming anemic and did not have time to play with friends like other children did. Forty years later memories of my childhood dancing years revisited me during one of my classes when an undergraduate student described how, after having an accident, she gave up a career in dance to become a teacher. I wrote about it in my journal: As I write this I have just realized why I was so emphatic with one of my students recently. She had described in class that until she had been involved in a car accident she had studied ballet and jazz dance. Now she was going into the teaching profession. I asked her if she was well enough to dance and she nodded her head vig- orously, but said that she did not have the confidence any longer. I became quite excited and exclaimed vehemently that she must return to dancing and follow her heart. I went as far as to say that I hoped I could talk her out of teaching during the semester and get her back into dancing. I wonder . . . was I really talking about myself? (Jacobson 2008, 116–17) Writing in my journal after the class I realized how passionate I had become as I advised my student to return to dancing instead of becoming a teacher. Reading back what I had written, I realized a con- nection between my own childhood relationship with ballet and what I was telling my student. As one of my dissertation advisors used to say to me, “Take my advice, I don’t use it!” My words of advice came from my own life experience and probably did not have much to do with my student’s life choices or what was good for her at the time. Sometimes we are as unaware as I was before I wrote in my journal about the danc- ing student in my class. It is crucial for us to uncover these feelings and biases so that we can become more intentional in our behaviors and more authentic in our guidance with young children.