Meet the teachers

Tonight was meet the teachers night at Noah’s daycare and it went really well – especially considering that my car broke down, not just leaving work, making me later to get to Noah than I ever have been, but then broke down again. It is actually still there and the service centre/dealer can bloody well pick it up since they assured me they’d found the problem and fixed it. I know I’ll have to go along but seriously.

Anyways, so after nightmare redux (Carl was working waaay across town; he left as soon as I called him, and I waited a half hr for the tech to come jump it the first time, but I still beat him to the door) I landed at Noah’s school late, and on the heels of the parent teacher night. We weren’t planning to both attend and to therefore have Noah have to stay there.

But after confirming a few times that he could walk out to our cars when he wanted, Noah opted to show me all his favourite things in his classroom (mostly, I noticed, things he is probably not allowed yet, like a loom).  Then he showed me pictures of him proudly – hat day, horse riding.  He didn’t look miserable in the pictures. He didn’t look miserable at school (once I got him; he was standing at the window waiting for half an hour, despite efforts on the staff’s part to distract him, due to the lateness I’m sure I can mention a few more times in this post).

He also introduced me to people in his class. He is speaking more and more and his vocabulary seems pretty good, but I’ll admit I was a bit floored that he could introduce more friends in his class than I could keep track of.  “dat hannah. hi hannah. amman! dat amman!”

I kind of feel like we turned the corner, before our end-of-Sept deadline.  I think unless I get new evidence, Noah will be staying at his Montessori and I can continue to love my new job.

Due to all this introducing and so on I missed most of the formal stuff; Carl listened and then we traded so I got to listen to the part about teaching kids to read, not that I care.  I mean I care that Noah continue to learn to read but I do not really care if it is before grade one. I learned to read, fairly inexplicably (I never really learned phonics until I was teaching, which did make for some hillarity around pronunciation… still does), shortly before my third birthday, and it was both a marvellous boon and a terrible curse.

The Montessori method is basically phonetic, although it does word construction (spelling) before decoding (reading-ish), and I’m sure it’s great. I think the kinetic sandpaper letters are excellent.  And if Noah picks out the letters to play/work with, great. As long as they’re not pushing him, whatever.  He’s not in Casa yet anyway.

I’m such a bad parent educationally. I don’t really know how I went from wanting to be an elementary school teacher (well Teresa did; I wanted to  be a political journalist; this may answer it right there) to being someone who would unschool if she didn’t have to stay home for it.  Of course I’m paying for a pretty structured daycare sooo… hmm. I suppose I’m a contradictory parent educationally. But I know my job and I shook hands and drank juice.

I’m not sure why I care to notice and record this, but Carl and I were one of three sets of caucasian parents. There was no pattern to the rest of the kids; it’s just one big polyglot group, but it made me a little weirdly glad that Noah will go to school even more multi-culturally than I did.  It is funny how I still have little prejudices – one of his teachers is Muslim and wears the hijab and the jilbab (???) – anyways, traditional dress but no actual face veil, and at first I sort of thought “how can she hug my kid wearing that?” which is so ridiculous there are like, no words.  I can’t believe I even wrote that. But to Noah, it’s all just clothes, and you hug around them.  I like that.

Because me, despite living where at the grocery store it is probably seriously about 20% women in some form of muslim traditional dress shopping alongside me, and where my dry cleaning clerk wears the full burqua, I still feel brought up short by it sometimes, like i am suddenly naked and stammering. And it would be nice if Noah were more comfortable with it. (Esp. as Islam is going to be even more common by the time he grows up, from all indications.)

Someone did ask me if I thought Montessori stifles creativity (because it insists there is a right way to do things, is the reason I could uncover behind the question). All I can say is, not from what I understand have seen. I think any school or adult really can do that as far as any significant adult can, and Montessori is no different if its teachers are rigid and nasty.  But really I have a sneaking sympathy for the idea that things can be done right, because in my opinion, creativity is not about ‘doing whatever’ but about learning ‘the rules’ and then breaking them. As long as there is room for the break as well as the learn, I think it’s good.

In Noah’s case, I’m not at all worried. We have the wild creative spurts, the free form drawing, and, you know, faeries at our house. We’re good for that.