Gertrude Carroll[edit]

I spent fifty-two years as a kindergarten teacher. Fifty-two years of finger painting and alphabet songs and tying shoelaces. Fifty-two years of watching children discover that they could do things they thought were impossible.

I retired last spring. Eighty-three years old and finally putting down the chalk.

People ask me how I stayed in the job so long. The truth is, the children kept teaching me. Every year, a new class full of four and five year olds who hadn't learned yet that wonder is optional. They'd get excited about caterpillars. They'd gasp at a rainbow. They'd find absolute magic in a cardboard box.

Somewhere along the way, most of us forget how to be amazed. We grow up. We get busy. We stop noticing the extraordinary hiding in the everyday.

I started this wiki because I didn't want to forget what the children taught me. Happiness isn't complicated. It's not somewhere else, waiting for you to arrive. It's here. In the morning light. In the smell of coffee. In the laugh of someone you love.

You just have to remember how to see it.

— Gertrude Carroll, finding wonder in the ordinary