Lest We Forget

Montessori Life, Fall 2003 by Bronsil, Matt

ATTACHMENT: TEACHER-CHILD-SCHOOL

Andrew, age 6, walks up to a building he finds scary and enters a room with which he is all too familiar. He knows what is coming and tries his best to stay calm and brave so the situation does not get worse. All day he is subjected to a torture and humiliation that we, as adults, would find extremely disturbing. Finally comes the end of the day and he is relieved to be able to go to a safer place: home. He knows, however, that it is only temporary and he will have to face his fears again tomorrow with no real attack plan except "get through the day." Think for a second of all the possibilities I could be writing about: a war-ridden society where children are tortured? a child slave-labor camp? or. . .America's public school system?

While the story may seem exaggerated, in many cases it truly is not. A child with learning disabilities who enters the school building is often struck with the same types of fears described above. He fears being put in the spotlight and humiliated in front of his peers for not knowing an answer. He fears an upcoming exam where he will not be able to read and understand the questions, let alone come up with a viable answer. He fears that the entire reason he is struggling so hard is because he is stupid or lazy, as his classmates or teachers or even parents might claim him to be. He knows he tries as hard as he can to learn everything and it just is not good enough, so what other reason can there be?

A child with learning disability will not draw the conclusion that there must be something different about the chemical balance in his brain that causes him to have difficulty with traditional educational retention. Learning disabilities in a younger child are often discovered by the teacher making an observation of certain problems he or she is having in the classroom. From there, the teacher suggests that the parent have the matter investigated further to identify the cause of the problems. But why are so many students simply slipping through the cracks until later years? Isn't there a better way of educating our children so we observe learning disabilities at an earlier time? Isn't there a way that children with learning disabilities can progress in our educational system without feeling left behind, stupid, or lazy?

In October of 1994, a symposium entitled Classroom Ecologies: Implications for Inclusion of Children with Learning Disabilities was conducted in Bandera, TX. It was sponsored by the Illinois State Board of Education, Texas Education Industry, Division for Learning Disabilities of the Council for Exceptional Children, Great Lakes Area Regional Resource Center, and South Atlantic Regional Resource Center. The symposium included several researchers and teachers, both college-level and classroom teachers, to discuss the ways classroom structure could aid children with learning disabilities. The results were a fantastic reason why a child with learning disabilities could thrive in a Montessori environment. Although the term Montessori was never mentioned by the author, Katherine Garnett, the entire report seemed to be filled with Montessori philosophy on how to adapt a classroom. The article poses several key problems to traditional education.

Classrooms are crowded environments, arranged to maximize general, not close, observation of students.

In Montessori, space is very important. A child's work space is clearly defined, either by a table or a rug. Children are taught from day 1 to respect other people's working space.

As far as observation of students goes, one of the teacher's primary concerns in Montessori is observation of the children. It was Maria Montessori herself who said,

The teacher's first duty is to watch over the environment, and this takes precedence over all the rest. Its influence is indirect, but unless it is well done there will be no effective and permanent results of any kind, physical, intellectual or spiritual. (1967, p. 277).

So many times I have wanted to jump in when I see a student struggling with a material. I have to remind myself to sit back and observe the child working. I have to track every student's personal development in the environment. If observation of the individual child is important, it is vital that the child be in an environment where observation of the child is the main goal of the teacher.

There is a drastic difference between how the Montessori teacher observes and how the traditional teacher observes. The Montessori teacher observes each individual child working on a project that is self-directed, while keeping an overview eye on the room as a whole. Any discipline problems that come up will be self-evident because the child causing the problems is not focused in his or her work. The traditional teacher tends to keep a general eye open for discipline problems while getting little or no feedback as to whether the material being covered is being absorbed. In a traditional school setting, close observation of one child may be considered extra work. In a Montessori setting, close observation happens to each child on a regular basis.