Learning the Montessori way
When Maria Montessori graduated as Italy’s first female doctor in 1896, nobody knew what to do with her. After all, in the strict Italian society of the day, when a woman could not walk along the street without the company of a man, and could not write a personal check, there was no way that a woman could be involved in the potentially very private goings-on between a doctor and patient.
Even as a student, she had to do her work on cadavers alone, and in the middle of the night—it was almost unthinkable that she could be with a naked body, even a dead one.
To this day nobody is totally certain how she got into the University of Rome to study medicine, but by the time she was ready to give her dissertation to a panel of 10 men, the panel was so impressed they gave her a score of 105 when 100 was considered to reflect brilliance.
But there was still this problem—she was a woman.
So they gave her a bunch of kids who were considered to be mentally disadvantaged, and largely forgot about her. The first thing that Maria Montessori discovered was that the kids were not mentally deficient. They were malnourished, neglected, deserted and otherwise emotionally scarred, but they were eager to learn. Within months, she raised the performance level of those “disadvantaged” children so high that the powers that be in Rome were astonished and wondered what she could do with a group of regular children.
The result was the Montessori School network, which, in the intervening 100-plus years, has spread around the world and into every language. However, says Linda Jordan, owner and operator of the two Ramona Montessori schools in the 700 block of Ninth Street, any of her students could go to a Montessori school in China or Argentina and, provided it is a true Montessori program, apart from the language differences they would feel right at home, fit right in and carry on without a break in their learning.
Jordan has been associated with the Montessori methodology since moving from Ontario, Calif., to Ramona more than 30 years ago, and she is a devotee. “I visited Marilyn Streed, who was running the Montessori school in Ramona at that time and I was totally hooked. She became and still is my mentor.”
She cautions that not everything that says Montessori is necessarily Montessori. There are specific tools, instruments, methods and philosophies involved in the Montessori methods, and she insists that all of her 12 staff members be credentialed by the nationwide American Montessori Society, which is now the largest Montessori body in the world.
“However,” she said with a slight edge to her voice, “anyone can hang a Montessori shingle on their door and buy some of the materials on the Internet. That doesn’t make it true Montessori. One such piece of equipment is a trinomial cube, a mathematical equation which I can teach a 3-year-old to work with. Yet I give it to his father and he might spend all evening on it.”
Of the two campuses, one is the primary school with ages 2 through 5, and the other is pre-elementary through sixth grade. To walk into either is a mind-bending experience.
At the first one, everything is taught, including reading, writing, mathematics, geography, history, social skills, practical living skills—all going simultaneously in different rooms in a large, rambling house at 717 Ninth, called the Montessori Children’s House. (Maria Montessori’s first school was called the Casa de Bambini and opened in the San Lorenzo district of Rome in 1907.)
One of the first principles of the Montessori method, said Jordan, echoing the words of Montessori herself, is that young children are like sponges. They are anxious to learn and, if placed in a conducive learning environment, will teach themselves and each other with minimum guidance.
When each child arrives at school, they go to the activity they are attracted to, be it reading, mathematics or living skills. However, each student has a contract which requires them to spend time at each of the major learning areas each day. They learn to make choices very early, said Jordan, learning that they can only spend so much time at each activity in order to fulfill their contract.
Another quantum leap in learning methodology is that it’s not the student’s job to pay attention to what the teacher is saying, but that the teacher pays careful attention to what each student is doing and saying, and nudges each forward at the right time. Get the students moving in the right direction and then step back and see where it leads, said Jordan. Of course, she readily agrees that a ratio of five to six students to a teacher is enormously helpful, but that’s part of the beauty of Montessori.
In one room, a group of 3- and 4-year-olds had each drawn, cut out and colored the major continents of the world. They were now busy, correctly placing them on a map they were creating, and then identified the major animals that roam each continent — 3- and 4-year-olds who can name every state in the nation and the oceans of the world, and when they speak of dinosaurs, use their proper names.
Here’s a partial list of some the topics this same group have studied recently: The Solar System, The History of the Wild Wild West, The History of Toys, American Presidents, Our Bodies Organs, and Planes, Trains and Autos, Oh My—The Study of Transportation.
Detailed records are kept of each child’s activity.
“If a child is ready to start reading at 2, we start reading,” said Jordan. “If they are still not thinking about it at 4 or 5, we can develop strategies that will guide them toward reading through things in which they show a keen interest.”
At a Montessori school, be careful where you put your feet; you could be in danger of stepping on a child. Each child has a mat, about 22 inches by 15 inches, and the child’s name is on it. The child removes work from the shelf which has a precisely designated dot and then places it on a mat. The shelf is low enough for the smallest child to be able to retrieve and replace his or her own mat.
The student gets whatever tools are appropriate for the chosen learning experience—counting tiles for mathematics, a book for reading—and those tools must stay within the confines of the mat. (Despite there being 52 2- to 5-year olds, the place is incredibly tidy.) Within the room where the student has chosen the activity, they study wherever they choose. There are small chairs and desks, but most gravitate toward the floor—the teachers spend an awful lot of time on the floor.
“People come in and marvel that the rooms are always so tidy, saying that their own children never keep their rooms at home so neat,” said Jordan.
The first thing is to get rid of the toy box. The child goes to get a toy and quickly has 10 to 20 things spread all over the floor and has already forgotten what the goal was in the first place. “Get some shelves at a height where the child can easily reach up to and set a collection of toys on the shelves, rotating them regularly. Make sure that the toy goes back in the same spot each time and you will have a tidy child,” Jordan said.
Each student can invite another student to share their chosen activity and the invited is free to say yes or no, thank you. Similarly, a student can ask to join in the work of another student and the answer can be the same, either yes or no thank you, says Jordan, who is proud that more than one-third of her students are the children of regular school district teachers.
There are some things that Jordan will not tolerate. Principal among them are the two words “I can’t.”
“I never want to hear that,” she said. “My answer is, OK, you might not be able to do that today, but this is the first step to learning how. OK, you may not be able to write in your journal right now, but let me show you how to hold a pencil. We never talk of learning as being play. It is work and we use the word ‘work’ a lot. We never give homework. Homework is product oriented. Our teaching is process oriented and that process occurs in the school.”
Students spend either a full day (8.30 a.m. to 3 p.m.) or a half day (8.30 a.m. to 12.30 p.m.) and everything done during that period is a learning experience. The children prepare snacks for each other every day—two students in rotation preparing for the rest.
“If it is celery with peanut butter, apple slices and juice,” said Jordan, “the students slice an apple and the celery. There is a menu that makes it clear how many snacks each person can have, and everyone joins in cleaning up when it is over.”
They use real knives from a very early age and, “Yes, we have had nicks now and then,” said Jordan, “but we start them out with plastic and unpeeled bananas and pen marks for the slices.”
Wiping a table is an opportunity for writing instruction. One youngster, his face creased in concentration, was focused on pouring water from a jug into a glass “presenting a cornucopia of learning opportunities,” said Jordan.
As Jordan explained it: If he spills some—and they generally do in the beginning—now he has to learn how to clean it up, and that all starts with learning how to squeeze a sponge until it’s dry. Then he has to wipe the table top and that is done with circular motions, just like cursive writing, going from left to right and top to bottom, just as we do in reading and writing—learning, learning, every experience can be a learning experience, each one building on the ones before.
“We start the students out with cursive writing. The looping motion is natural for kids,” said Jordan. “Why we ever went to the manuscript method is completely beyond me.”
At the Montessori Children’s Elementary school, two houses away at 703 Ninth, I was barely through the door when a smiling young man stood directly in my path, with his hand stretched out and saying, in a strong, confident voice, “Good afternoon, sir, and welcome to Montessori Elementary School. My name is Vincent (Thompson, aged 8). May I get you a chair or a glass of water?” Explained Jordan, “It’s part of our grace and courtesy program. They take it in rotation.”
At this level, the students are introduced to botany, music, science, social science, foreign languages and music. Though state law places no restrictions on the number of students who can be at the elementary school, Jordan generally restricts enrollment to about 30 students.
Though the school covers kindergarten through sixth grade, students generally don’t refer to being in a grade. They speak of being in either the lower elementary or upper elementary and the ages are often mixed in study sessions with the older students sometimes taking on the role of instructor for a younger one, and the younger one feeling they are being taught by something like a peer rather than an adult.
“It’s all a matter of building self-esteem,” said Jordan. “Build a young person’s self-esteem and they can learn anything,” she said, again echoing the words of Maria Montessori.
“I can’t tell you how often a parent calls and asks what thing they can buy for their child that would be enriching and help them advance—some piece of software, for example,” said Jordan. ”My answer is always the same. Take them for a walk and talk about what you see. Go to the park, do a nature hunt, read a book together. You can’t buy the kind of enrichment and advancement that will achieve.”
For Jordan, education is a family affair. Her mother, Betty Adams, opens the preschool each morning and teaches sewing at the elementary level. Her husband, Mike Jordan, is retiring this year as the highly regarded auto shop teacher at Ramona High School, where his auto program has received nationwide praise and attention. He has been honored as California Teacher of the Year—an unusual achievement for a non-academic teacher—and her son and daughter-in-law are teachers in Ramona.
In 1901, Maria Montessori turned away from medicine and returned to the University of Rome to study the mind. But in 1906 she gave it all up to work with 60 young children of working-class families. It was with these children that she developed all her teaching methods, which became so successful that even learning disabled children were passing examinations for normal children.
She made her first visit to the United Stated in 1913, where Alexander Graham Bell and his wife, Mabel, were strong supporters and founded the Montessori Education Association in Washington, D.C. Other strong supporters included Thomas Edison and Helen Keller. Montessori was unsuccessfully nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1949, 1950 and 1951. She died in 1952, at age 81, in Noordwijk in Holland.
For more information, call Montesorri Children’s House & Montesorri Children’s Elementary at 760-789-5363 or 788-0910.