Grace and Courtesy

Grace, Gratitude and Goodness Gratitude has become popular these days. Psychology has caught up to biblical theology in understanding that a grateful disposition is connected to a healthy mind. What becomes strange to me is the fact that, without Christ, we don't have a direction for our gratitude.  It is a wonderful thing that we can be thankful that we have another day of life, or that we get to work with children (what a privilege!) or that we have food in our refrigerators. But we miss out on deeper joy if we don't know to whom we can be grateful. There is a Person who has given these things to us. Getting to the Person--namely, Jesus--allows us to get to the praise, producing deep joy. Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name. Psalm 100:4 I often like to tell the children in my care that I am thankful for them, that they are in my class and that I get the chance to see them. This reiterates the reali...

Moving forward A few weeks ago I celebrated one year of living in Massachusetts. A year ago, I drove a UHaul truck with my few belongings to a storage unit, and began living with a 92 year old woman who'd been in her town all her life. She's a lovely Christian woman, who I learned so much from in those months. One thing in particular is that it is easy to become accustomed to doing things your way. I never want to become too comfortable in that mindset. Working with children has the ability to amplify your desire to have power "over", or it can increase your flexibility to have power "with". Both ways of being require practice. So after ten years of living in New York City, working at a total of 3 schools in 10 years, I decided that I was done in the Big Apple. I wanted to leave before I hated the place. The extremes of humanity so easily found in Gotham wore on my heart and mind. To experience it daily--homelessness, unfathomable wealth, continued partialit...

Often times, when you are making decisions in life, some incidences seem like an accident. But I've grown to learn that God is at the helm of your life; everything that occurs therein has a purpose. Learning about Montessori pedagogy is no exception. I'd recently come to New York City around 2015. Fresh out of college and growing antsy from the Midwestern lifestyle I grew up in, I was ready for the cultural saturation that I believed NYC could give me. I was living in the South Bronx and had recently finished a year of Americorps (City Year) as well as beginning (and being kicked out of) an accelerated teaching program. This would give me the opportunity to teach at the high school level while getting my Masters in education. It took a few tries before I was actually able to get that Masters...but that's getting ahead of the story.  At that point, my goal was to get a few years of teaching under my belt, find some back doors to getting into a graduate program without the di...

What is this hand holding onto?  From the earliest time that I can remember, there was an understanding that I had to be careful. My parents taught me to look sharply at my surroundings, at the media that I encountered--mostly on the television--and to act accordingly. On one level, I understood that when I went out into the world, I  represent my family name; it was important that I held that name in honor. But it wasn't until later that I began to put the pieces together--that one of the major reasons I had to be careful and do things differently was because I was a black person. I wasn't given "the talk" per se. There wasn't a specific moment in my teens where my mother and father pulled me to the side to remind me that, because of the color of my skin, if I were stopped by the police, there were certain strategies I needed to employ to get home alive. Honestly, I didn't have a lot of friends growing up and the opportunity to use the family car was limited ...

Great apologies  I have not been so diligent in getting out my blog posts and podcast episodes in a timely manner and I want that to change. If I'm really going to put focused, continual effort into this work, I think it's only right to walk in a state of discipline. This is an area of weakness that I have when it requires work that appears to only effect myself. Like many teachers, a strong motivation to do work comes from those it will effect, in my case the small children in my care. But when it comes to myself,  I have great difficulty staying motivated. But this is why we continue to grow, right? This blog/podcast is meant to be an intersection of Race, Christianity, and Montessori pedagogy. I'm often thinking about all of these things throughout the day and how they effect one another. But today I want to get a little personal and talk about how I began my journey of walking the path of the Christian. My hope in sharing this is to bring to light the work that God is d...

I want to take a moment to encourage our teachers all around the country and world.  Often times, we have to do the work of encouraging each other, as (at least in America) it often feels like teachers are not respected to the same extent to the crucial nature of our occupation. Whether you are a Montessori teacher or not, your work matters tremendously. Your call is to teach others to learn, but more than that, you are a care provider. You take up the role of nurturing the minds and well-beings of a generation that will come after you, and this means you may not see the full fruit of your labor. Yet you do the work anyway. There is some deep love you must have towards the art of learning and sharing. It is not intrinsic to all human beings, though learning certainly is. So thank you. Thank you for caring for children who are not your own, yet you have made them your own. Thank you for taking the time to unravel how an idea works so that you can stitch it back together winsomely, p...

I have a habit of reading multiple books at once. Hopefully I'm not alone in this. As I have just gotten off of a wonderful vacation, I took a good chunk of that time to read. And as you might imagine, my reading list is right at the intersection of  Race, Religion, and education (I couldn't think of another "r" word that means the same as education). Some of these books are what I'm currently reading, so I don't have a review on it per-se. But hopefully they are helpful. Race How to be an Antiracist  by Ibram X. Kendi My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized trauma and the pathways to mending our hearts and bodies  by Resmaa Menakem Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman (which could also be in the religion category, but ah well) Education The Tao of Montessori: Reflections on Compassionate teaching by Catherine McTamaney Citizen of the World by Maria Montessori Religion   Jesus Knowing God by J.I. Packer The Little book of Christian Living by John Ca...

 I know I should be going into the new year with a forward gaze, but I am amazed at what has happened in the world (and in my life!) the past few months. Let me share with you.  I began this blog and podcast with the intention of combining many different interests into one intersecting conversation. I am a Christian and I view my life through that lens. That is to say, I strive that everything I do would be done to give glory to God in light of His great love towards me and the world, chiefly shown through the death burial and resurrection of His Son Jesus Christ our Lord. (That was a long sentence.) Under that umbrella, I am a Black man whose career is education. I believe that educating young people has a way of changing the course of their future. I have chosen to adopt Montessori pedagogy as the means through which I educate children. While I've been in education for 10 years, I've been on this specific journey of Montessori philosophy for the last 4 years. I've gone fr...

 One of the things that drew me to Montessori Education is that built within the philosophy there is a deep respect for children. By respect, I mean that the child is not seen merely as an empty vessel that the teacher is meant to fill up with knowledge. Rather, children are seen as the human beings they are. There is something humbling about intentionally maintaining the dignity towards someone who depends on others for support. But I have not merely described children in that statement; I am describing everyone. Adults may come under the guise of believing we are independent in a solitary way. Yet, we depend on children to further humanity. As a Montessori teacher (or a parent, or any adult really), we have the great privilege of being a bridge to the world we inhabit so that our children may take up their task of making that world better. So when I am giving a lesson on the binomial cube, or helping a child change into clean clothes after their "accident", I do so knowing ...