Climbing the pink tower (Origins Stories Part 3)

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 difficult mountain of standardized tests, and become a professor so as to teach at the college level. After ending one graduate program abruptly and finishing up a stint as an afterschool teacher for a non-profit in Harlem, a teacher friend was going through her own crisis.

She was a public school teacher in the largest public school system in the country. But she felt that she wasn't able to teach the children in a way that connected with their inherent dignity...or her own for that matter. I could resonate with many of these emotions, though I didn't have as much experience in the public sector as she did. She'd heard about a public Montessori school that opened up in our neighborhood a few years prior. It was the same population of children that we'd both taught already. Being both persuasive and persistent, she became a teaching assistant there. She later asked me to join her.

At the time, I was living with friends, down on my luck and looking for long-term work in education. I conducted a walk-through of the school, and thought it was a nice enough place. They hired me on the spot. There I saw and worked in a 1st-3rd grade mixed-age classroom (some call it lower elementary, Montessori called it the second plane). I reiterate that I'd seen many of these  children in the Bronx neighborhood I lived in. But the determination and willingness to learn, the camaraderie and familial interactions, and the kind respect that everyone showed to each other (students to students AND teachers to students) was amazing. And the advanced nature of their work! Learning scientific classification, practicing complicated mathematics...I had to learn more.

I stayed in that school for 4 years, reading everything that I could get on Maria Montessori, and learning extensively from my colleagues. I started working on my Montessori early childhood teaching credential, and got my Masters degree in Early childhood and Special Education. The primary reason I left the school was due to the pressures for the school to perform better on the standardized tests the state was presenting to the children. without higher scores, the school would be shut down. To perform better as quickly as possible, there was a strong and subtle push away from Montessori pedagogy. I then went to a few private Montessori schools in NYC. My experience in pedagogy increased, but I was irked by the clear disparities and elitist nature of the atmosphere there. It wasn't always intentional, but the culture runs deep, particularly Montessori education in America. (I'll need to do a separate post on this, including on the ways this is changing). 

That brings us to the present day, mostly. I stay in Montessori schools because I am seeing the observations of a brilliant doctor, who reverenced the unique way that God has created humans to develop and thrive, being played out in front of me my colleagues. I'm seeing the whole child be nourished, and I'm able to be part of that holistic care. It is a great privilege that I hold, though not without melancholy; Montessori education should be available for everyone if they want it. May the systems change to make this so.