Way back in the day of my Montessori career, like early morning, I gave my first talk at an AMS National Conference. So long ago that it wasn’t yet called the Montessori Event!. I’ve added an exclamation, but perhaps that’s how it’s supposed to be spelled and pronounced now? In any Event (see what I did there?), that year it was in Chicago and my rather ambitious topic was “Zen and the Art of Montessori Teaching”. Leading up to the presentation I had nightmares, envisioning a group of saffron-robed Buddhists shouting me down as “not knowing what I was talking about”. As I was barely thirty-years old at the time, those dream monks may have had a valid point. The main thrust of the talk was how difficult it was to stay present as a classroom teacher, to stay in the moment, to stay in the “now”. How difficult it was to maintain a “beginner’s mind”, a concept explained beautifully in Shunryu Suzuki’s seminal book, “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”. The idea being that often it is our younger and less experienced teachers that bring a more valid view to a classroom, a child, a material. They are unburdened and unshackled from preconceived notions of an area of the environment, or the behavior of a child. “We can’t put the group circle there, because I’ve tried that before and it didn’t work”. “That intervention won’t work for them, because I had a student just like that before and it didn’t work”. It could well come to pass that a new teacher tries something and observes the result to be disastrous, but at least it fails on its own merits. There’s honesty there. My presentation concluded along the lines of keeping yourself open to new visions, strategies, concepts, children, because truly we never experience the exact same classroom twice, even moment to moment. In more modern, more trendy language, it would probably translate to “keep and cultivate a growth mindset”, but I like “beginner’s mind” better.
This past week, I gave a series of webinars online, at the request of Alison’s Montessori; the subject being Geometry at the Elementary Level. Included in the many materials I presented, was the Triangle Drawer of the Geometric Cabinet, specifically, The Sum of the Interior Angles of a Triangle. It’s one of my favorites. Tracing the Seven Possible Triangles in the Universe, children color the angles in red, cut them out, and lay them angle to angle to angle, showing they form a straight line, a straight angle, 180 degrees. It illustrates quite elegantly the difference between a traditional school experience, starting with the answer and those dry “If…. When” statements from 9th grade Geometry textbooks, and a more constructivist model in a Montessori classroom, done when the student is ten years younger and ten years more interested in Geometry. Not wanting to reveal in great detail just how old I am, I have probably given that presentation a few hundred times to both children and adult learners. It’s hard to hold on to that beginner’s mind when your mind could probably do that lesson and check email at the same time (Important Note: I didn’t do that). “Are there any questions?”, one politely asks the group at the end of any lesson. I was only mildly flummoxed when a teacher asked, “Why?”. “Why do we show this lesson?”, I replied. “No, why do the interior angles add up to 180 degrees?” My brain rolodex started to spin… surely I knew the answer to this question… had no one ever asked me such an eloquently simple thing? Much like the Grinch when he attempts to assuage Cindy Loo Who (who was no more than two), I fumbled a bit, drawing circles around each angle… in the end admitting that I was botching the whole thing quite royally. Sigh. The next day, it was off to the Internet to find the answer. My son, Elijah, famously (at least in our family) stated that “if you have a question, someone else had the same question”. Sure enough, there were a great many sophisticated geometry websites that gave various ways to prove the theorem, but I was looking specifically for one that could be adapted to a Montessori material. I was very satisfied to find one, using the congruency of alternate interior angles, which is a separate Montessori presentation, in the proof. Rapture! I eagerly awaited the next evening’s webinar to show the group (see photo below). It’s debatable who was the most excited, me or the webinar participants!
Dismay at not knowing the answer to the initial question quickly evaporated, to be replaced by a much more comforting thought that there are still things to be learned, still lessons to be revealed, even within experiences we’ve lived over and over.
Follow the Child 