The Big Recess Show

 Today at Recess about six kids in my class decided to put on “a show”. They issued tickets (sprigs of cedar needles torn off some trees on the playground) and they created a stage by standing on top of  a platform made from two adjacent mini picnic tables flanked by three plastic toddler slides used as towers for performers to stand on. Three more friends sat behind upturned Tupperware playground equipment storage tubs that were laid flat to serve as deep booming djembes in the style of the drummers in a recent African Drumming and Dance assembly.

The main performers stood on the platform and tried to wrangle the attention of their assembled classmates by shouting over them, trying to call them out of their self-absorbed cacophony of inattention—something, unfortunately, I immediately recognized was modeled from the spirit and phrasing of some of the frustrated hectoring I remember doing in similar situations when they come back from specials or wait at the rug for classmates to return over a ten minute period. I felt contrite about those times I must have thought I was right to yell at children to get them to do what I thought better just because I could do it without being challenged. It’s as if my karma was coming thorough them back to innocently announce, “I’m rubber and you’re glue, whatever you say bounces of me and sticks to you.” As a teacher, you can only think, “Ooh, do I sound like that?’ The answer is, “Yes, you do, obviously sound exactly like that.” It’s like watching an actor imitate you right down to the mannerisms.

But the more interesting thing about this show was that it also reflected what they had learned from the African dancers and drummers. Margaret (not her real name) drummed a pattern and Daria and Samantha (not theirs either) copied it, just like the kids at the assembly. Margaret as a confident and older child was unquestionably the mentor who created out a drum phrase that other two carefully observed and copied in call and response.

The performers also sang Christmas and Hanukah songs, as they had learned to do in preparation for the school’s traditional Festival of Lights. And what’s more, as they did so, the group boldly commanded the stage with unquestioned self-assurance as they had learned to do in the After School Drama Club’s all-ages, production of "The Wizard of Oz" and in family trips to New York City to see "The Lion King" on Broadway.

I was drawn to Montessori Education because of the way it offers a blessed remedy to the way it seemed that all children including myself were disrespected, condescended to or ignored by the adults in charge of our world as we came of age. Being in a school of children empowered by privilege, by loving parents, and by the genius of an educational system that gives the guidance and opportunity to children to develop their own self-directed initiative—I often am treated to astonishing scenes like these where children who are 6 or 7 or 8 or 9 years old are simultaneously children of that age as well as embryonic versions of the dynamic stage performers or simply the intelligent adults that they will be in just a few years. It’s amazing to have this vantage point on these people as children. They are fun and funny to watch, when they aren’t just willful and unreasonable and silly to the adult trying to keep their classroom productive and calm as a full time project.