What – No Briefcase?
Montessori and Paperwork
Edward Fidellow
Montessori
parents are often bewildered by the lack of paperwork coming home with their
child. There’s hardly any! So what does my child do all day? What can he be
possibly learning?
For
most of us our school experience was a blizzard of paper work – spaces to fill
in, lines to write, dots to connect. Pages upon pages of busy work that
hopefully conveyed to parents that we were learning. Much of it was redundant,
boring and the waste of a good tree! But that was the measure for parents that
learning was happening.
You’ve
now entered a new universe when you chose a Montessori program. You didn’t
choose Montessori because it resembled your learning experience but because it
represented the learning experience you wished you’d been privileged to have.
When you visit the environment your eyes feast on amazing materials – colors,
shapes, complexities. Is this material really for my three year old or four
year old - isosceles triangles, quatrefoils, reniform leaf shapes? Does he
really touch it and feel it and use it? But when there is no paper trail coming
home, you wonder!
Socrates
said, “There is nothing in the mind that is not first in the hands.” And it is
the touching of these concrete materials that begins the building of the mental
processes in your child. Traditional education begins with intellectual
development hoping to make the abstract concrete. Montessori education begins
with the development and refining of the senses, allowing your child to build
this concrete knowledge one step at a time until he is ready and poised to make
the great intellectual leap into the abstract. In Montessori education, it is
the child’s own developmental timetable that causes this explosion of or calendar but a continual cultivation and
development of the child’s growing intellectual power that is being fed day by
day in a manner that allows your child to appropriate and practice the tools
and skills that will form his intellectual abilities for a lifetime.
All
this time the child is building within himself this intellectual capability.
Montessori education is very much like the construction of a jetty. Rock after
rock is submerged in the water, seemingly lost beneath the surface but then the
day comes when the latest rocks begin to become visible and break the water’s
plane. Your child is building a very concrete foundation for all further
intellectual development one achievement at a time.
These
processes and achievements, in many ways, are very private for your child. Your
child often doesn’t speak of them – or want to speak of them until after
(sometimes long after) they have become operative and well established in your
child. It is not that they want to exclude you from their developmental journey
but they guard it – not jealously – but protectively, as if speaking about it
would jeopardize its development.
This
is why your best ally in understanding your child’s development and progress is
the teacher and not random pieces of paper that wend their way home. The
teacher is a good guide to share with you your child’s progress because much of
what the teacher does in the classroom is to observe and document this
progress. Montessori education is never just a question of teaching or
presenting materials but of presenting and teaching at the appropriate time and
in the appropriate way. Each child has a different learning style – one size
doesn’t fit all. And it is this different learning style of your child that is
celebrated and used to your child’s advantage in the learning process.
It
is not so much what is put into your child that creates this tremendous
Montessori learning explosion but what comes out of your child – out from their
personality, their talents, gifts, and temperament. Montessori is about aligning
learning with the way your child learns. There may not be another time in his
life where the whole world is bent to give him every advantage and opportunity
to learn as quickly and as effortlessly as possible.
Every
day your child is absorbing the whole world around him trying to make sense of
it, trying to master the parts he can. And it is in his Montessori classroom
that this world is made tangible and accessible. He can’t always tell you when
he is going to make the discoveries that will propel him on to new and even
more exciting discoveries. (“Did you know that three times two is the same as
two times three? The windows are rectangles and so are the tables.”) Instead of
being given the answers – which he would be expected to put down on paper –
which could go home; he is given the questions and allowed to discover the
answers for himself. This joy of discovery is hard to put on paper.
There
are two ways better than paper to know what your child is learning. Ask his
teacher. She has the great joy of daily watching the discoveries light up your
child’s eyes, of watching your child work the challenges of learning and the
joy that comes to your child from mastery. She is watching the emergence of
your child’s personality, watching his character form and his intellect
develop. When you are talking with the teacher listen to the excitement of her
voice as she relates your child’s progress and read in her eyes the joy she
shares in your child’s discoveries and accomplishments. Much better than paperwork.
Second,
ask your child. But don’t ask him what he learned today – he may not be able to
tell you (and it still may be private but he’ll share with you when he is
ready.) Ask him what he sees out of the window. He may just read the street
signs to you (which isn’t bad for a three year old.) Ask him about his friends.
Ask him about colors or dinosaurs or cars – and then listen. He will tell you
all kinds of things. He will use all kinds of words – vocabulary and concepts
you didn’t even know he knew. And if you keep listening you’ll learn not only
what he learned but you will set a pattern for conversation and discussion that
will take you well beyond the teenage years – much more satisfying and
important than paperwork.
No comments:
Post a Comment