Montessori for me

From kindergarten to the fifth grade I attended Audubon Montessori, a public Montessori school that also ran a French immersion program. Although I attended such a school I never read Maria Montessori’s own literature. While reading “Spontaneous Learning” I was constantly comparing my experience with Montessori’s words and found my experience very similar to her words although I didn’t experience some of her exact practices.

“The factor of individual limitation and differing degrees of perception are most keenly felt in the teacher. In other words, in the quality of this intervention lies the art which makes up the individuality of the teacher.” Like at any school each teacher had their own style and image held by the students. There was Mr. Ralph, the loved “cooky” teacher who wore Hawaiian or animal shirts every day or Ms. Vicky who would yell in every class and force students to take off the erasers from their pencils because she wanted to see all their mistakes. The individual limitation performed by the teacher was definitely an art form.

Another portion of Montessori’s essay that stirred a sense of nostalgia were the tools used to teach writing -although I don’t remember how I learned to write - or that one object is hard and the other soft. My classrooms were filled with all different kinds of blocks, maps that we could put together and take apart, and weird tables that required us to use our hands in learning. The education was a hands-on and explorative experience. As for a “spontaneous investigation of the surroundings..this voluntary explosion of the exploring spirit,” where “the children experience a joy at each fresh discovery,” I may have had my moments. We were allowed to do as we chose for regulated amounts of time, but there was never the pure freedom as in the Sudbury or Free Schools. In one sense, due to the fact that my school was pubic and had to comply with administering the standardized tests - which ultimately affect funding, recognition, and job security – I don’t believe it was fully possible to “bring about the spontaneous progress of the child” and deny mistakes.

These experiences ended once I was in the fourth and fifth grades which were in the same classroom and under the instruction of the same teacher with the sixth graders. The hands-on learning approach ended as well as the allowance to let our spontaneity guide us. I don’t know to what extent a Montessori school has helped me and my peers differentiate ourselves from students who didn’t attend Montessori schools. Additionally, we all left Audubon Montessori to attend normal junior high and high schools which eventually put us into the environment that Maria Montessori was trying to avoid.