Tom “Teacher Tom” Hobson is a preschool teacher, writer, speaker, artist, and author. He is best known, however, for his namesake blog “Teacher Tom’s Blog” where he has posted daily for over 4 years, chroni-cling the life and times of his little preschool in the rain soaked Pacific Northwest corner of the US. For the past 12 years Teacher Tom has been the sole employee of the Woodland Park Cooperative preschools, a collection of 4 separate parent-owned and operated schools housed under a single roof, knit together by Teacher Tom’s democratic, progressive play-based pedagogy. The children come to the school as 2-year-olds in diapers and leave as “sophisticated” 6-year-olds ready for the larger world. Teacher Tom came into teaching through the backdoor, so to speak, having enrolled his own child in a cooperative preschool, where he began working daily in his daughter’s classroom as an assistant teacher under the tutelage of both veteran teachers, although he’ll be the first to tell you that most of what he learned came from the children themselves. When it was time for his daughter to move on, he “stayed behind,” where he plans to remain for the rest of his life.