Jerry Gorin

Substitute Teacher

While I have some fond memories of the outdoors growing up, I didn’t have a real “aha” moment until later in life.  I spent most of my youth and early adulthood like most people I knew, concerned with all the shiny human stuff like movies and music and living in a big city, with nature serving as pretty wallpaper that I’d occasion for some exercise or maybe a third date.  But a moment did come, when I was comfortably paired up with my future wife (Teacher Kat), and we found ourselves caring for a difficult rescue dog.  We started spending a lot of time looking for obscure trails to take the dog in the Angeles Forest, and after many weekends out there, one day it kind of just hit me, something so novel and yet so obvious.  Suddenly I was seeing all these patterns, hearing recognizable bird songs, smelling old plant friends and witnessing their cycles through the seasons.  And every trip back to the trails was full of new offerings to fill up all my senses.  Maybe it was just the sheer repetition of it all, but at some point it clicked.  This was a happening place.

The outdoors have since become essential to my life, and my wife and I knew it would be a linchpin for our family once we had kids.  I wanted it to “click” for our kids as soon as possible.  I wanted them to get their hands in the dirt and their feet in the mud and to start finding their own bits of magic in the forest. It was important to us that they be rooted in their local environment, that they build their own connections and relationships and be self-motivated, and furthermore that this would be a strong bulwark against all the screens and general noise out there competing for our kids’ precious attention.  

From the moment that Kat suggested starting a forest school I was fully bought in— this was the perfect thing to do for our family and also such a vital project to help our community find meaning and richness in the chaos of modern life.  While I’d like to think of my parenting style as being very hands-off, I think we owe our kids the gift of being very deliberate when it comes to the values we wish to pass down, and I can’t say enough about how impressed I am with the depth that the forest school pedagogy brings to the table and how well it aligns with my general parenting philosophy.  It’s uncanny, really.  And I aim to bring all the passion I have as a parent and a nature lover into every class that I’m a part of and to help guide many more little ones on the journey of nature connection.