Montessori Madness: A Book for Parents

A friend of mine just alerted me to this new book coming out, calledMontessori Madness: A Parent to Parent Argument for Montessori Education, by Trevor Eissler.  I am thrilled to find a book that is written from a parent’s perspective rather than another teacher or administrator perspective.  Trevor has graciously allowed me to reprint an excerpt from his book…and an online interview featured here is in the works, so stay tuned!

Excerpt from Montessori Madness: A Parent to Parent Argument for Montessori Education, by Trevor Eissler

So traditional schooling stinks.  Now, what  to do about it? We thought the only option left was homeschooling-a choice that filled my wife and me with elation and dread. “Wow, we could spend all day, every day, with our three wonderful children,” we beamed happily. “Wow, we would be spending all day, every day, with three boisterous children,” we gulped. The work of our particular careers did not lend itself to spending long stretches of the day working side by side with small children. My wife must spend her office hours in front of a computer screen with a phone to her ear, and my workday is spent 40,000 feet up in the sky. It would be impossible for us to simultaneously be successful at work and at home. We debated whether one of us should quit and one of us should teach.

Regardless of how convincing the arguments for homeschooling are, there is one small problem, one teeny-tiny fly in the Kool-Aid: you have to be really, really good parents. We are simply not that good. Yes, I think I can be interesting, exciting, and inspiring. Plus, I am interested in learning and relearning things myself. I like to read and add and subtract and experiment, but I have grown-up interests too. I just did not see how I could carve out time for activities that were important to me as well as be a good parent, while at the same time assuming academic teaching duties. If I continued to work, I would be out of town half the year flying airplanes. Something had to give.

We love our children dearly, but it takes a special parent to be able to spend an entire day with several rambunctious children and still be a pleasant person to be around. We felt we were frequently just surviving the day instead of actually accomplishing anything. How could we add a major undertaking to the mix without declaring martial law and losing the fun of spending time with each other? So even though I felt I could teach better than professional teachers, I feared over the long run it would make me a worse father.

Maybe these are lousy excuses. But the trepidation we felt was sincere, as was the belief that home school really would be better for our children than the local public school. We were confused.

And then…a miracle!

It just so happened that during the several months that my wife and I were discussing options, a new friend of ours asked my wife if we had considered the Montessori school her daughter attended. We had not. Did we know anything about Montessori, she asked? We did not. Had we heard of Montessori? Nope. She suggested we set up an appointment to observe a classroom in action. My wife later filled me in on our friend’s short list of a few of the differences between Montessori schools and traditional schools.

“There’s no grading, no homework, and they teach cursive first before print,” she said.

“Teach cursive first?” were the first words I blurted out. “That’s crazy. Why would they do that?” It sounded New Age. The no-grading part piqued my interest however, as it was precisely one of our main arguments against schooling. The no-homework part was icing on the cake. (There’s important stuff I want to do with my kids after school: biking, playing catch, wrestling, taking trips! I don’t want to sit around arguing with them to finish their homework.) I urged her to set up an observation session for us.

A few days later we arrived at the school and met the director. She escorted my wife to one classroom and me to another, two of the possible classes that our kids would attend if we decided in favor of this school. I opened the door. My idea of what education should look like has never been the same since.

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