Weekends. Weekends mean different things depending on if you are a parent of kids that still live with you or not. Weekends are full of hope and promise. They are full of mornings overcome with spectacular gratefulness for the family you have. And if you are a parent of littles, at the end of the day, those grateful feelings getting completely flip flopped on their head. You end the day with extreme guilt. Guilt with a capital G. This is because your intensions are always good. Always. You love your kids and are grateful for the time you can spend with them over the weekend. However, you are also a person. A person with dreams of your own. Ambitions of your own. You start off thinking you can check off both spending wonderous, loving time with your kids as well as sneaking in some of your own work to help advance your family's chance to continue to travel to all the beautiful places in the world to enhance their experiences as children. Yes, your motivation is to help them develop a habit of travelling so they can find ways in their adulthood to continue onto this path. And, fingers crossed, will want to take you along when you are old and too frail to go on your own. It's a balancing act that always ends up not being that - balanced. Seems pretty impossible. Someone always ends up being disappointed: either your kids or you. But you try each Saturday morning, anyway. The hope is that when you ARE busy with work, your kids find a creative way to entertain themselves such as my girls making matching hair styles above :)
What have I noticed? I have noticed a couple of things being a public school teacher in a Montessori classroom. First of all, I don't always choose Montessori material when teaching. This might sound disappointing. However, with a classroom of 21 children and one teacher, using Montessori material for each lesson is always not feasible. The Montessori system was designed for small groups of children of differing ages. Which leads to my second point. This is not what we have in the public school system. Sure, we might have three grades in one class, but many have just two grades. This is what I have. And this is not easy! Any teacher can tell you that teaching one grade is much easier than teaching a split grade class. And now here is the third point. Even though there might be some classes with differing ages, there is still one teacher in the classroom. There might be an EA (education assistant) but they would only be in the class to work one on one with a child who has a designation; they are not there to assist with all children, although some choose to do so. How can small group lessons be made with only one teacher? Well, it can be done. But it takes very eager and dedicated teachers who have the patience of angles and are masters of multitasking. All this is possible, I'm not saying there are no successful Montessori public classroom out there. I know there are many. But if you choose to put your child into a Montessori program in the public school system, you are rolling the dice on whether they are getting a true Montessori education or not.
