I had scheduled a mandatory classroom observation at the Montessori charter school this morning. I was hoping to learn Aitch’s status in the lottery by now, so I could cancel if he wasn’t going to get into the school, but that did not happen, nor did the threatened ice storm materialize, so off I went.

I spent about 45 minutes in the Kinderhaus, a class of 32 five- and six-year olds. There were two lead teachers and one assistant teacher (a certified teacher with a master’s degree, I was assured, not an aide). My overall impression of the class was favorable, but I did see a few small red flags.

The Good:

Many of the students were working independently, or with some guidance from the teachers, on one or two projects during this 45-minute stretch. Some of the students were doing very advanced work for kindergarten. One girl, for example, was working with a large box of alphabet cut-outs. As the teacher read words out to her, she would choose the letters to spell them out on a mat on the floor. The vowels were red and the consonants blue, allowing her to see the pattern in the one-syllable words. Each word used one or two two-consonant blends (west, trap, just, next, bland). The girl made some creative mistakes that illustrated that she was really thinking about the phonetics (for example, she spelled trap “chrap,” and the teacher repeated the word so that she could hear the sound more clearly). Afterwards, she copied each of the words onto paper. Another girl was putting the numbers 1 - 9, 10 - 90 (by tens), 100 - 900 (by hundreds), and 1000 - 9000 (by thousands) in an array on the floor. When she finished, the teacher had her choose one card from each column (4000, 600, 50, 6) and then assemble 4,656 things, stacked appropriately on each card. (For example, there were six beads; 5 bundles of 10 sticks each; 6 tiles with 100 dots on each; and 4 cubes with 1000 dots on each.)

The room was active, but not crazy. The kids were allowed to move around fairly freely, but they were not disruptively loud or boisterous. It seemed like a level of activity that most children could work with — neither too restrictive nor too anarchic. In the “life skills” corner, the children had to sign up for snack time by writing their names on a whiteboard and erasing them when they finished the snack.

The room was full of materials that made up interesting mini-lessons. Each set of materials was on its own tray or box, and the children were responsible for putting things back in the correct order after they finished a lesson (and I did observe this in action several times). Even with three teachers, it must have taken hours and hours to prepare all the materials, although there may be some kind of Montessori store where you can buy this stuff pre-made.

The teachers facilitated learning, rather than teaching lessons. Each teacher worked with two or three students at a time, taking notes on their progress. I had the sense that the lessons were really individualized. Meanwhile, the teachers handled interruptions from other students, and I never heard a raised voice. By that I mean that the teachers rarely even raised their voices to conversational level. Most discussion took place in a VERY low tone, so that I had to strain to hear even when the teacher was only a few paces from me. When the teachers reprimanded the kids for breaking a rule, they explained why the rule was important (”We can’t take the marker away from the whiteboard because then friends who want to sign up for snacktime have nothing to write with.”)

The Questionable:

The children were required to wear indoor soft shoes or slippers in the classroom, and I winced as I watched 32 little bodies schlek around in very unsupportive footwear. I suppose it might be OK for a five-year-old to run around barefoot all day, but backless slippers and the like seemed worse than barefoot. I foresee 64 fallen arches and a windfall for the local podiatrist.

Two of the three teachers were absolute stonefaces. The third teacher smiled at the kids while interacting with them and while praising them, like a typical kindergarten teacher. The other two were completely stoic. At one point, a bunch of girls gathered around the assistant teacher while she kneeled to investigate the case of the missing marker. One girl, standing behind the teacher, threw her arms around her in a hug. The teacher said, “No thank you” and removed the girl’s arms from around her neck. I almost cried. I suppose when there are 32 kids in the room, you can’t encourage a close relationship with one or two, but surely there was a kinder way to do this than a cold, “No thank you”? Later on, the same little girl asked another teacher if she could go to the nurse, and she said, “I was up coughing all night and I’m tired and now I have a runny nose,” and the teacher looked at her and said, “Get a tissue and we’ll see how you feel later.” A little bit of sympathy might have helped that little girl get through the day. Certainly you would extend that to any adult in your office who wasn’t feeling well.

While most of the kids were working intently, not all of them were. I noticed one girl and two boys who had a hard time choosing something to do. The first boy caught my eye because I knew him; he’s one of the few Asian kids in town with Asian parents. When I came in he was working within the orbit of one of the teachers, but soon wandered away to roam around the room. After about 10 minutes the teacher came to collect him again, and they worked on their task for a few minutes, but when she was called away, he immediately rolled over and stared at the ceiling. He roamed around for five more minutes, then started working on a water conservation activity in another corner of the room. He had been absorbed in that for a ten-minute stretch when I left. I felt oddly relieved to see him settle down to an activity.

Another little girl was very vocal and social, more interested in visiting than working. At one point the teacher pulled her aside and said, “Remember that every day we write down what you do here to show your parents. If you don’t do any work then we have to tell them that.” “I know,” the girl said, “but I’m really hungry.” “I just want to make sure you know you’re responsible for that,” the teacher said. Then the girl walked away, and the teacher didn’t follow up. I thought that a five-year-old might need some more direction than that.

Another little boy walked around the room for the 35 minutes. He didn’t work on any lessons or play with toys. He seemed a bit nervous, biting his hand and twisting his clothes. A teacher did notice him after about 15 minutes and said, “It’s time for you to go do math.” He walked to the math area and interrupted two boys working there, then continued wandering around. Finally, he sat down to a snack.

I don’t want the negatives to overwhelm the positives here. Teaching is hard, and those teachers must be doing an amazing job to have a room full of five-year-olds mostly on-task and doing productive work. The observation confirmed something I was taught in grad school, though: you need to use a plurality of teaching methods to reach every kid in the classroom. Montessori allows for a plurality of Montessori methods, but it obviously doesn’t allow the teachers to break through and use some non-Montessori methods that a minority of the kids might need.

Of course, those kids — or different ones — could languish in traditional schools, too.

Anyway, it’s a moot point because when the mail came this afternoon, Aitch had gotten the dreaded thin envelope. He is #67 on the wait list, which means that if a nuclear holocaust takes down the whole 2008 - 2009 kindergarten class, and then it fills up again with the wait list and then a terrible pandemic carries off all THOSE children, and then it fills up again, and then and a few kids move out of the district, THEN he will be able to join the class. In other words, I’m not counting on it.

So this evening I trudged off to the kindergarten registration at the local public school, situated at the unappetizing intersection of Milk and Lime streets. I signed one piece of paper authorizing the school nurse to give my child potassium iodide if there is indeed a nuclear holocaust, and another paper saying that I would pay $3300 tuition for the full-day kindergarten program and some unspecified amount, probably $250, if I want him to ride the bus, because we live within 2 miles of the school. (Since when did public schools charge tuition? Still, it’s a fraction of what preschool costs.)

There was one kindergarten teacher at the meeting. She looked huggable.