Helping Facilitate Adult Learners in Becoming Montessori Teachers--July 2023

 

    On Friday, Seth and I presented "The Creation Story"--a kind of scientifically based, but poetic, narration of how the Universe emerged from the darkness and cold of nothing, exploded in an instant, and scattered fragments which coalesced to create burning stars and cooling planets from gaseous clouds of hydrogen, which were pulled into orbits by gravity to make solar systems and galaxies including our own.

    With charts and props and tools including a globe, flashlight, balloon, a set of test tubes with oil, water, and molasses, a microwave-shrivled apple representing the irregular cooled crust of the earth, heated milk in a pan with a skin (also representing the earth's crust), and a script printed on 11 cards, we retold this story.

    All the items were laid out on a long cloth with a second cloth draped on top, and unveiled slowly as the story progressed.

    Seth and I divided the presentation. I focused on a dramatic reading of the script, doing my best to tell it in teacherly seriousness as if it were it was most important story in the world (and the Universe, in fact) as Seth performed the demonstrations, lit candles, sprinkled salt on black paper, and inflated a balloon covered with stars, among other cosmic dramatizations of the laws of astrophysics.

    After children view this presentation in a Montessori classroom, something which happens sometime near the beginning of each school year, the youngest students, who are typically 6 years old, are sometimes stunned and astonished by the realization that we humans have come to be on an Earth that emerged from nothing, and that we are nearly unimaginably small compared to the World, and our World is even smaller compared to the Universe, and that the laws of gravity and light, and the states of matter that we can observe on Earth, shaped the formation of everything there is.

    It gives meaning to our lives as learners and inquiring, creative beings to realize that language, mathematics, and the studies of culture, geography, biology and history are all various means of understanding this world that we have been mysteriously born into.

    What's more, we can see how by finding our way guided by orderly habits in an orderly environment, fostered by caring adult guides, who work to provide children with opportunities to master the tools of learning via self-initiative and choice, that we can come to self-knowledge with a sensitivity to our role withing something larger than ourselves, a classroom community, a school community, a town or city, the human family, the Earth and ultimately, the Cosmos.

    On a clear day, such as the morning of the creation story, the true nature of our human role in the context of this story is revealed to be connected to infinitude--something unimaginably larger than the immediate place we're in wit the cast of characters including our family and friends that we might otherwise see as "all there is." 

    Once you know as a child, that the World we see is the result of ultimately mysterious origins via the interaction of matter over Eons, the circumstances of each day take on a connection to grandeur on the most Cosmic scale. And since everything and everyone we know shares this origin, we are all connected by it, so we might as well show respect and kidness to each other and be careful and reverent with each other as we come to self-knowledge in a place of collective growth and learning as each child works to decode the mysteries and become at once more themselves, and more skillfully members of a community.

    After the presentation of the story, we invited the adult learners to take a "20 minute electronic and conversation fast" as we intentionally allowed space for the experience to resonate--not only at the level of its information--but in the sense that as adults, the role of the teacher is to foster the intellectual foundations of Cosmic awareness. We encouraged them to put themselves in the perspective of their youngest students, and we gave them drawing paper, crayons, plasticine clay and writing paper to reflect on images and thoughts  (and feelings) that were resonating with them.

    We played an Indian Raga for 20 minutes during this otherwise quiet time. At the clay table, four people sat, buisly shaping brightly colored plastecine. It looked like this was an expressive therapy session. There was something urgent (or calm) finding form from the pinching and pressing of their fingers. They were discovering as much as making something, and they seemed to be transformed to an altered state, beyond classroom note taking or conversation or internet browsing.

    When the music ended, we formed a circle and sat on the floor. Each person was given an opportunity to share an impression. There was ceremony to this, and a sense of heightened emotion. The presentation had not only shown them how they could elicit cosmic consciousness in children, but it revealed an even larger sense of truth:

    1) That their role as Montessori guides is not just a practical job like being a math teacher, or history or a chemistry teacher, but it involves conveying a sense of reverence for the implicate order of what we can observe in the structure of living things and geology, and in the beauty of the world and cosmos that we have all been born into. You can't unknow how big the human story is once revealed to a child.

    2) That as Montessorians what we're up to is something we may not have been clued into if we had not been Montessori school children ourselves. 

    We have an opportunity to offer children a better childhood than we were given, and that to do this, we are making preparations to become something different and maybe more exacting than what our teachers had been for us.

    While this is a heartening prospect, it also seemed to evoke grief at how lacking our own childhood experiences had been and how challenging it is to reverse the momentum of culture and consciously expand the possibilities. It means being a kind of adult that our own childhoods may not have prepared us for--the kind of adults who serve the emergence of self-actualized (because self-directed and self-trusting) and socially, ecologically and cosmically attuned children, on their way to adulthoods in a what has the possibility to be a better world.

    For this reason, there was gratitude and grief as people expressed where the experiences of the morning had brought them. N., one of the adult learners, ended our sharing circle by offering an aria about war and grief by Rachmaninoff. As she sang, everyone was moved and solemn by the beauty and the sadness of it. I imagined everyone conscious of the precariousness of the human future, and the suffering being expressed and witnessed across the language and culture barrier and across centuries through her art and the art of the composer. We listened like we were hearing humanity make its case with the angels to be forgiven in spite of our mistakes because we are capable of understanding and expressing something sublime. 

    And in the quiet reflection after this experience many of us, maybe all of us, were glad that we could offer this kind of experience to children that would make for the potential for them to have an understanding larger than we were raised to have when we were learning to make sense of things.