Batman and Beyond

The following letter was sent to the parents of Austin Montessori School and is used with their permission.

Dear Parents,

We are all stunned and grief-stricken at the violence that erupted at a midnight screening of the latest Batman movie. The news coverage has been pervasive and will continue as the investigation and, ultimately, the trial continues.

We would like to recommend the following excellent advice from Dr. Laura Markham about how to talk to children who may be exposed to media coverage or conversations with peers or other adults.

http://www.ahaparenting.com/_blog/Parenting_Blog/post/How_To_Talk_with_Kids_about_Tragedies_Like_the_Aurora,_Colorado_Shooting/

Those of us dedicated to the healthy social and psychological development of children are also saddened to know that even had there been no gunman, no bullets and no booby-trapped apartment that night, there still would have been trauma in the theater. It would have been quiet, hard to see, and unnoticed by the media, but it would have been no less real to the children in that theater -- infants, 3 year-olds, 6 year-olds, 10 year-olds -- whose parents chose to ignore the PG-13 rating and warnings like this one from IMDb.com: "Parents should note that this is in no way a typical superhero movie. It is a violent and gritty story that is powerful and moving. But also very violent and disturbing. Definitely not recommended to children younger than 13."

As Maria Montessori wrote in 1947 in an open letter to the world's governments,

"Childhood constructs with what it finds. If the material is poor, the construction is also poor. […] In order to build himself, he has to take by chance, whatever he finds in the environment. The child is the forgotten citizen, and yet, if statesmen and educationalists once came to realize the terrific force that is in childhood for good or for evil, I feel they would give it priority above everything else."

Although our society is in some ways obsessed with childhood, our children are still too often "forgotten citizens." If we want to create a world in which tragedies such as the one in Aurora rarely, if ever, happen, we can continue to work on behalf of children everywhere, through Montessori education, through political action, through sharing with our family, friends and neighbors what we know about the needs of children, and through supporting the enlightened efforts of many others, such as the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (www.commercialfreechildhood.org).

In our children, there is great hope for our world.

The Administrative Team

Entreprenurial Montessori Violinist

Must be the violin case that gives her away:  Diana Cohen is a Mafioso; a certified member of the Montessori Mafia -- so named by Peter Sims in his Wall Street Journal article of a year ago.  As Sims reported, "The Montessori Mafia showed up in an extensive, six-year study about the way creative business executives think."

Cohen is not a business executive exactly.  She is first and foremost a violinist--the concertmaster of the Richmond Symphony in Virginia.  So she is professionally creative.  She is also " the mastermind behind ChamberFest Cleveland, a festival of chamber music that will present its inaugural season Wednesday, June 27, through Sunday, July 1, at several venues."

Cohen models creative entrepreneurial behavior:  she had an idea and ran with it; she had the vision, the energy, the organizational skills and the willingness to do what she had never done before.  She was willing to risk failure.  And she is making a cultural impact on the city where she grew up:  Cleveland, Ohio; where she attended Ruffing Montessori School.  (full disclosure:  one of my former students -- a great kid!)




 

Perfect!

"Striving for excellence motivates you; striving for perfection is demoralizing." --Harriet Braiker, American psychologist and writer. (Thanks to ASCD SmartBrief for its "Quote of the Day".)

“They never get asked to create anything,”

American kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests. Learn by testing or learn by making? (Thanks to Post Oak parent Lisa Eddleman for sending this article to me.)

All the City's a Classroom

This high school class promises experiential and expeditionary learning in NYC. It certainly gets students out of the restrictive cells and bells structure of conventional schooling. And the students say they like talking more than listening to lectures, and completing projects more than writing papers, but is touring the same as real engagement? Is learning by looking the same as learning by doing?

soulcraft

An article sent to me by my son, Jacob: "Shop class as soulcraft." Work of the head vs work of the hands? A false dichotomy. Here's a question from the concluding paragraph: "What is it that we really want for a young person when we give them vocational advice? The only creditable answer, it seems to me, is one that avoids utopianism while keeping an eye on the human good: work that engages the human capacities as fully as possible." The human capacities unite the work of the hand and the work of the head. And since the title includes the term "soulcraft," clearly the author, Matthew Crawford, is thinking of the work of the heart as well.

What if quizzes measured kids’ ability to question, not answer?

Reinventing education. We've been talking about it for a long time. Thanks to Post Oak parent Stephan Kinsella for sending this along to me.