There are, despite the loneliness of our classrooms and the heartache of having been called to teach, others on the path with us. Teaching is hard. Teaching in a Montessori path is even more so. Montessorians are asked to give up so much of ourselves, to make ourselves humble and lowly before the child, to be servants, to be scientists, to be saints. We often let ourselves down. There it is, then. We will let ourselves down. But there are others on the path with us. We can lean on each other. We can walk in each other’s footsteps. Sometimes we’re at the front of the path. Sometimes we’re following another traveler. Sometimes we’re resting. Sometimes the laughter of our group is so cacophonous that we forget how tired our feet are. Sometimes we’re so far ahead or behind that we can’t even see each other anymore. But we’re not alone.

We are each other’s navigational stars. Montessori’s words, across generations, guide us. Our own words, whispered in each other’s ears or passed in notes or published in books, they give us guidance, too. They remind us on the hardest days that we’re not alone. We are not alone. We share certain tendencies, certain traits, common among humanity, common across decades. We are working in common toward a perfection we may never individually see. But we’re on the path. And we’re not alone.

A Delicate Task

Teaching and Learning on a Montessori PathBy Catherine McTamaney

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 Catherine McTamaney
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-3142-6

Contents

Foreword by Marie M. DuganLiving Legacy and former President of the American Montessori Society.....................viiNavigation: An Introduction.........................................................................................xiiiOrientation.........................................................................................................1Order...............................................................................................................17Exploration.........................................................................................................33Communication.......................................................................................................49Activity............................................................................................................65Manipulation........................................................................................................81Work................................................................................................................97Repetition..........................................................................................................113Precision...........................................................................................................129Abstraction.........................................................................................................145Perfection..........................................................................................................161

Chapter One

Orientation

"The child is both a hope and a promise for mankind."
—Maria Montessori


When did you know you wanted to be a teacher?

Has it been since childhood, when some warm smile
greeted you to your first day at school, or when you
connected with that one voice who made more sense
than all the others?

Did you line up teddy bears and baby dolls into your
own classroom, or did you hear the call to teach when
you lacked the ones you needed yourself? Who were the
teachers who touched your soul?

Who guided you to teaching?

When you imagine yourself as Teacher, whose voice do
you hear calling in the distance?

I. The Naming of Things

From the Latin, oriri: to rise. Orientation is that natural tendency to know where we are and how we fit in with what's around us. The term, "orient," is traced to the early fourteenth century, when it suggested the rising in the east of the sun each morning. In the mid-eighteenth century, it came to mean, "to take one's bearings," or, literally, "to face the east," as the Earth seems to do each morning. When we orient ourselves, we take our own bearings. We search for our physical place and, equally importantly, our spiritual place in the communities we share.

Our desire to understand our physical place is easy to grasp. When we enter a new environment, we look around. How tall is the room? Where is the light? Where will I go once I cross the threshold? Am I comfortable here? What is here that I recognize? North, south, east, west, downtown, uptown, midtown, near the library, across from the school, out back, by the window. We place immediate markers in our minds, and in doing so, we understand our physical place. We know if this is our place.

Some of us orient ourselves by the map points: north, south, east or west. Others find our physical place in terms of deeply-engrained knowledge of where things have always been: past McCreavy's auto shop, out by where the post office used to be, not quite to the I-440 intersection. We need to place ourselves within the environment around us, and we do so by situating our place against other objects or benchmarks we presume to be unmoving. Our physical orientation is dependent on our knowledge of what is or was in this space.

Our desire to understand our spiritual place is much more elusive. When we enter a new environment, our spiritual orientation asks different questions. Do I feel comfortable here? Do I know anyone here? Is it what I expected? Do the people here look welcoming? Do I feel at ease? Warm, welcoming, friendly, intimidating, cold, off-putting ... we place different markers in our mind, with the same hope to understand how we fit in. We place ourselves spiritually within the environment around us, and we do so by situating our place against other places that evoked a similar feeling. This reminds me of home. Industrial architecture feels cold to me. I cannot see around that corner. Our spiritual orientation is dependent on how we feel in this space, on the emotions of comfort and safety or fear and vulnerability the space offers to us.

The need to orient ourselves, both physically and spiritually, is no new phenomenon. Orientation influences rituals across cultures and religious traditions, from the east-west orientation of the world's great cathedrals, to the mandate to face Mecca in Muslim prayer, to the orientation of the angel Morini on Mormon temples or the offering of Native American prayers to the four compass points. From the ancient Mayan cities built from east to west to modern yogis facing east to complete their sun salutations, our spirits seek orientation, that connection to what else is around us, what has been and what is unchanging, to something as profound as the rotation of the Earth or to something as mundane as the closest fire exit. We are driven by an essential human tendency to find our place.

II. Orientation and The Child

Teaching is a calling. We are called to the profession, and we are called each day to the horizon that we cannot see. Our orientation as teachers needs always to point beyond the edge of the map. And although we seek security by understanding where we begin, we do so with an eye on the unknown. We want to know where we are, to know better where we are going.

The children, too, seek their own orientation. For the children in our classrooms, we provide the map points. We offer the careful grids of reliable, thoughtfully placed materials. We offer the same lesson in the same way throughout the year. The terrain is unchanged. Because our classrooms offer a consistent topography, the child can be the cartographer of his own learning, mapping mapping mapping, building his knowledge of the concepts of Practical Life, Sensorial, Math, Language and Culture. As the child readies himself to leave the classroom, his map will have the same hills and valleys as the other children who've discovered alongside him, but the fingerprints will be most assuredly his.

When we are criticized by those who don't understand us, for being too rigid in our routines, too precise in our presentations, we should remind ourselves that the predictability of the Montessori classroom is not for the benefit of some curmudgeonly teacher who just doesn't want the children to be too loud. Our routines are our daily rituals, and like all ritual, they make concrete what may be too big for us otherwise to grasp. They provide landmarks and signposts for the child seeking his own orientation. We tell the child, "You are safe here. Your world is reliable. And your influence here is real."

We admire the harmony of the normalized classroom, when the children have all already found their own paths and are uncovering without our constant guidance. And just as...