BY JUDY LIN-EFTEKHAR
UCLA Today Staff
“I thought, ‘I’ll just see
how it goes,’ ” recalled Moises Roman of the work-study
job that was to change his life.
It was 1992, his second year at UCLA as a premed
student, when Roman took a job for a few hours a week as a teaching
assistant at UCLA’s Bellagio Center, which provides child
care for the preschool children of students, faculty and staff.
Not that being with kids was new to him. As
the oldest of five children, he recalled, “I always helped
with the kids at home and in my neighborhood. They would just
kind of gravitate toward me.”
His new job went so well that Roman gave up
medicine and switched to a major in history. He has worked for
UCLA Child Care Services ever since. Today, he is a lead teacher
at University Village Center in West L.A.
Single, with no children of his own, Roman
has his hands full with a classroom of 24 3-1/2-to-5-year-olds.
He has developed a reputation for his work with high-spirited,
hard-to-handle children.
“I tend to look at those kids and wonder,
‘What is it about you that makes you so feisty, and how
can I help you use your feistiness in a positive way?’
” he said of his approach.
Roman has become so accomplished that he has
been featured on “HeadsUp Reading,” a distance-learning
satellite broadcast network sponsored nationally by Head Start
and in California by the Department of Education and the California
Asso-ciation for the Education of Young Children. The program
showcased the work he and his UCLA Child Care Services colleagues
have done to introduce literacy to very young children.
“We start at infancy,” he said.
“A lot of people think the kids are too little, but we’ve
been able to establish a foundation for learning that allows
children to come to reading and writing at an early age.”
In his free time, Roman visits other child-care
centers to offer training and assistance. He has also been active
in recruiting other men to the traditionally female field of
early child care and education. For the past three years, he
and University Village Director Gerardo Soto have done workshops
statewide on recruiting and retaining men.
Having men as teachers early in a child’s
life is crucial, Roman believes: “It introduces them to
a positive role model of men as nurturing, caring, calm and
charismatic.”
The Men in Education Network honored Roman
with the 2002 Teacher of Children Award, recognizing him for
his strong desire to make a difference in the lives of children.
“We have to take care of the children
now, while they’re little,” Roman said. “We
have to make sure that we’re nurturing things that are
important, that we’re steering them in the right direction.”
