The Swing of Things

2010 has started off nicely at Walden. I went around on Monday to talk to the other lower elementary teachers about calendaring and how the students would be reading the date. I suggested that "Twenty-ten" is the proper way to read the date, but Teresa was not having it. She said, "I'm not going to teach them, "twenty-ten;" it's "two thousand ten." I responded with a weapon no Montessorian can withstand:

Nomenclature.

Oh yes I did. I totally went there. I told her that, OK, she could teach the 3-6 class to read the date "two thousand ten," but that she'd be teaching her children improper nomenclature for dates. Historically, dates in English are read as a pair of two-digit numbers. Ask any historian when William the Conqueror invaded England, and every last one of them will tell you, "Ten sixty-six." No one says, "One thousand sixty-six."

She blew me off, and I went off to class. About 20 minutes later she came into the room with her whole class in a line - we were on line at the time. She said her students wanted to show us what they had learned. Holding up a card that read, "2009," she asked the students to read.

"Two thousand nine," they all responded in chorus. She held up the next card.

"And what does this card say," she asked.

"Twenty-ten," the all replied.

Ah, my heart swelled with pride. I got Teresa to change her mind about something. Go me!

Tower Tuesday was a raging success. That's got to be one of the best ideas I've ever had. They get SO MUCH DONE, and everyone is feeling that awesome sense of, "Check out what I did!" I love it. Many of them have discovered that certain towers; the 'S' drawers, the 'D' drawers, the 'F' drawers; are really simple, and they're racing through four, five, six of them in a morning. It's so fantastic to see the light that shines in their eyes when they're really cooking.

I had an enlightening experience this afternoon. One of my students, JS, has had kind of a rough week. She has been lost in her own world - not motivated to get anything done, distracted, etc. Her mom came in this afternoon, and I mentioned this difficulty little miss has been having. This evening I get an email from her mom. Seems they talked about it, and her mom asked what has been going on. Little miss responds that she's had a BUTTON in her mouth for the last three days(!!), and she was so focused on it that she couldn't do her work.

Seriously? A button? A BUTTON?! Three days I've been trying to pull this kid out of her Christmas break visit to la-la land and I find I've been playing second fiddle to a button.

But I'm thinking there's a lesson to be learned here. What might I be overlooking? What other "buttons" might be keeping my students from being their best selves?

Brings a whole new meaning to "pushing my buttons."

Rambling now.