Marlo Stanfield was a character on the HBO show The Wire. While his character of a ruthless drug kingpin has little redeeming qualities in the real world, one of his iconic lines from the show can be a good lesson to early childhood educators and that is the line “My Name is My Name!”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=jCaBYEEFTKE

Essentially this was a kinda convoluted way to get me to the point that in ECE, your reputation matters and people talk. While there are 1000s of people working in ECE, it’s still a relatively small community and people have conversations about other people in the field they meet and or have worked with. Whenever I go to conferences, there are always people I know or people who know people I know. The degrees of separation are not large. Chances are when you apply for a job, someone at the place you are trying to work at either knows you directly or indirectly. Moreover, even the parents and families of the children you work with talk and gossip and teachers .Thus, my advice is from early on in your career to pick something you want your name associated with and run with it. While all of us in ECE must be generalists both in terms of developing curriculum and working with a wide range of families, it is important to have some special skills that people associate with you. For instance, maybe you can play guitar, know how to teach yoga and mindfulness, are an expert on a specific special need, speak multiple languages, are knowledge about policy, or gross motor games, or art activities, or potty training and so on.  It does not have to be any of those. There are 100s of skills or special areas of knowledge you can associate yourself with. But, my advice is to pick one and then make sure to market that about yourself so when people hear or read your name, they associate it with skills or knowledge that can help an early education program thrive. To paraphrase Marlo, “your name is your name.”