Montessori Upper Elementary

I got to sub in a Montessori school today - only a half day, but I had wanted to sub in that school for a while.  When I lived in Alaska, I subbed several times in a Montessori school and was impressed with it.  And I have wondered since then how general the Montessori model was for upper elementary age children.  It was interesting to me that several of the things were the same and others different.

Physical characteristics of the room
True to the Montessori model of schooling, there were a lot of wooden materials in both classrooms.   But, also in both classrooms, the wooden materials don't seem to be being used much.  For instance, today I saw a couple of interesting models of the sun and the planets, including the Earth and its moons, but they were high up on a shelf and not in use, while the students worked on a worksheet packet about phases of the moon.  There were a lot of reference books available, but the students seemed to use the information in the packets the most.  The room in Alaska had wooden tables of various sizes throughout; this room had standard desks for each student, with small tables at various places around the room.  The room in Alaska seemed spacious; this one seemed very crowded.  But, in this case, some of the crowding was due to a plethora of large tanks for turtles, lizards, fish, and other creatures.  Personally, I would like to have seen some more large tables for their work.

Assignments
In both classes, the students had a work schedule that they filled out.  Long term projects were listed in one section, daily work in sections devoted to each day.  In both classes, the assignments seemed to be specific to grade levels and not to current achievement levels.  The 4th graders had one social studies assignment; the 5th graders had a different assignment.  There were two different math books, one for 4th grade, one for 5th grade.  In a way, I am a little disappointed that there didn't seem to be much individualization of achievement levels.  It may be that the classes are differentiated, since there are multiple 4/5 grades in this school.  I really couldn't tell that.

Textbooks/Worksheets
This classroom seemed to use worksheets more than the school in Alaska.  In Alaska, they had a lot of laminated assignment materials that the students rotated in using.  Since the assignments usually came in 2 or 3 week chunks, there was plenty of time for the students to rotate through the assignment materials.  Neither school used textbooks for much of their work, except for math.  

Other interesting things
The class had an aide; the one in Alaska did, too.  What a difference this makes!  Supervision is easier, grading is easier, talking to individual students and small groups is easier.  It was a moderately large class, 25 students, but you can get to know the kids better, even in just a half day, with another adult in the room.  Your focus doesn't need to be quite as widely scattered.

The academic level of the students in this class seemed average.  So perhaps the same work for all of them in each grade was appropriate.  It was hard for me to tell.

Final thing
Both Montessori schools address teachers, administrators, and staff by their first names.  It must be a characteristic of the Montessori philosophy.  I am not sure I am comfortable with that.  I think I would prefer some mild honorific, such as Teacher Laura or Ms. Laura.  I guess I am not as egalitarian as the Montessori philosophy would have me be.  Still, I had a interesting morning.  I would go back.

Geographic Knowledge

I taught a math lesson this past week for fifth grade students.  It was evidently a lesson that the teacher had skipped over and planned for me to teach the day she was gone, as the students remarked that they were going backwards in the book.

The lesson had to do with using map scales to find the straight line distance between two places on a map.  Interestingly, using the scale and even the rulers was not really a problem for the students.  The biggest problem was trying to find the cities in the U.S. that were to be used for the measurements.  The students mostly had no idea what the letters MS, KS, CT, or IL stood for.  They also didn't know where most of the notable cities were located.  I was asked more than once if Chicago was a city or a state.  They needed help to find San Francisco.  I knew that kids' knowledge of geography, even US geography, was not great, but I was a bit surprised that it was this bad.

I frequently play a game with kids if we have extra time before going somewhere.  I have the students name a country in the world that is NOT the United States.  I get all sorts of interesting answers - Chicago, Texas, and, it never fails, Africa.

I love maps and I cannot quite fathom that kids are so lacking in knowledge about basic world geography.  I wonder if it is just Americans, or if children (and adults) from other countries are also lacking in this knowledge.  Even the kids I taught in Alaska, many of whom were children of military personnel, were really unsure about whether Alaska was a different country from the US.  They kind of knew that Germany was a foreign country.  And, even though many of their parents were stationed in Iraq at the time, I don't think many of them could find Iraq on a map. 

This is discouraging to me.

Morphing Brown Thing

I often sit at my computer and look out the window. I have a fantastic view of the Alaska Range and I never seem to grow tired of looking at it.

The other morning, I was looking out the window and noticed a brown lumpy thing at the edge of our lawn - and it was moving. After much searching of the Internet, I decided that, although I couldn't really see quills, it must be a porcupine, since all of the other choices were obviously wrong - it wasn't a badger, no stripes - it was too big for a marmot, etc. I watched it for a long time and then it just seemed to go to sleep and I gradually forgot about it and went off to work.

The next morning, I looked to see if it was back and saw a much larger brown thing exactly where the smaller brown thing had been the previous day. It had morphed.  [There was a moose picture here, but the link to it has been broken.]


I haven't seen one of these for months - and now, here it is in the back yard, serenely munching away.

Clear View

The mountains are clear right now. It occurred to me yesterday that, in some ways they resemble crinkled aluminum foil, painted over with Wite-Out. This is not a very poetical image, even though the mountains are beautiful.

When I first moved here, I was struck by how the whole vista to the south looked like an elaborately photographed Hollywood backdrop, with only the nearby trees in front of the backdrop actually seeming to be real. As I have come to know the place better, this image has faded slightly, but is still striking. The view out the window has two distinct distances - the close up and the very far away. The middle distance is shielded from view by the close.

Is there a metaphor for life here? The things in the distance are the past - mostly static and a bit unreal. What we see most closely is the present, which obscures the middle distance.

Best not take that too far.