Montessori helps children develop a strong work ethic.

Not with coercion and duty,
Not by making everything a game,

But by helping them experience effort as worthwhile: With an older child or teen, we can give reasons. We can persuade and encourage directly.

But if they don't already have a love of effort?

Or worse, if a habit of dependence or passivity has been ingrained?

Then persuasion feels like swimming upstream.

Everyone in education wants to help children develop a Love of Learning™

But nobody cares about the far more important and high-stakes task of helping a child develop a love of *effort*

Nobody, that is, except Montessori: Sure, the more traditionalist types might talk about how important hard work is.

They might complain about how kids today don't have any grit, perseverance, or resilience.

But the importance of *loving* effort? No, indeed.

Mixed-age classrooms are *rocket fuel* for learning and development.

Montessori discovered this by accident, and then made it core to her approach.

Here's why a mixed-age environment is so powerful—for the youngest, the oldest, and every child in between: 1. Children crave role models

Children (especially young children) are not very interested in same-age peers.

Babies imitate their parents. Toddlers and preschoolers want to cook with you, clean with you, do everything you do.

I've put off writing a thread on "why I quit teaching" for a long time.

Mostly because it's personal, and depressing.

but it's important to see what's so bad about the status quo if you ever hope to change it, so I want to try and name the biggest factors: The school I taught at was not exceptional.

It was in a small, clean town just outside a decrepit rust-belt metro. Pretty rural.

Not wealthy, not destitute, but it qualified as low-income.

Being a stepmom is uniquely challenging and fraught. I want to try and explain the uniqueness.

It starts, I think, with the wicked stepmother trope and how this is not straightforwardly fact *or* myth.

https://twitter.com/_samantha_joy/status/1877433347695092204

When our kids were first told about my existence, before we met, they were scared.

They weren't afraid that I would be cruel necessarily... moreso that *if* I was, nobody would believe them if they said so.

After all, this is how all the stories go!

How do you help a toddler think logically? Have self-control? Build self-esteem?

The Montessori answer: let her juice an orange.

Seriously, here's how it works: 1. The activity requires a precise set of steps:

The child washes her hands and carries a tray of supplies to her table.

She squeezes, pours, and discards the peel. She enjoys the treat!

Then, she cleans up and puts everything away, ready for the next child.

Everyone thinks they know what kids are like.

Rowdy and messy. Zero attention span. Frivolous and fickle.

Maria Montessori repeatedly found evidence of the exact opposite.

In the end, she concluded we *don't know kids* at all: Montessori was a scientist, skeptical and severe.

She was not readily persuaded.

“It took time for me to convince myself that this was not an illusion. After each new experience proving such a truth, I said to myself, “I won’t believe yet, I’ll believe it next time.”

How should we help young children develop positive social skills? The typical answer:

>put children in groups
>enforce norms like sharing
>encourage collaborative play

But this approach *backfires*... often tragically. Montessori saw this, and developed a new approach: Most people think the focus for ages 0-6 should be socializing.

Learning can wait, they say.

This is the time to meet other children and do things together: play outside, pretend, build things.

In Montessori, children start learning many skills *early*

>6mo babies drink from open cups
>18mo toddlers put on their own coats
>3yos prepare meals & scrub tables

But WHY??? (Hint: the reason isn't what you think) Many people see toddlers sweeping floors or washing windows and get nervous.

They imagine parents-as-drill-sergeants, forcing kids to grow up too soon.

Even if you're gentle and encouraging... why rob childhoods? Why not just "let kids be kids"?

If the vast majority of kids:

> hate & fear math
> think they're not a "math person"
> have scored below proficient for decades

the problem isn't their attitude, it's their *education*

It's past time for a math revolution. Here's how Montessori lights the way: Montessori's formal math curriculum starts around 4yo.

By the end of kindergarten, it is normal for children to:

> understand fraction equivalences
> do operations with *4-digit numbers*
> identify over 2 dozen geometric figures

In common core, this is 3rd grade+ work

Montessori's formal reading curriculum starts around 2.5yo. There are NO:

> rote drills or workbooks
> guessing games or 'sight words'

But by ~5yo, children read, write, and study grammar at ~3rd grade level and they *love* every minute of learning.

Here's HOW: Montessori has 4 major innovations that make advanced & joyful reading possible:

1. Prep starts early
2. Much is taught indirectly
3. "Writing" is taught before reading
4. The approach engages all the senses

Montessori believed learning to read starting at 5+ was *too late*

In her schools, formal phonics instruction starts around 2.5 - 3yo

And reading preparation starts even earlier with younger toddlers...even babies.

But WHY??? (Hint: The reason isn't what you think) Many hear 'toddlers learning to read' and get nervous.

They see a method for tiger moms and the rat race.

They see a pushy method, improperly focusing on cognitive goals.

Why steal childhoods, they think. Why not just let kids play?

Montessori programs for children ages 0-6 are radical:

> Babies sleep in floor beds, not cribs
> Toddlers use knives and prepare meals
> Preschoolers predominantly work alone

Why? It has everything to do with the child's nature & needs in the 'First Plane of Development': Though it seems obvious today that babies, for example, are learning all the time,

for millennia, nobody thought children under ~6 had any intellectual capacity to speak of.

Montessori believed there's a tempting, but mistaken, way to understand child development.

Without correcting this error, our approach to parenting & education does more than hold children back, it can warp them.

A kind of foot-binding for the soul.

The mistake goes like this: Development is a linear progression.

A person starts at ~0% knowledge and skills and this gradually increases as they grow.

Thus, a 3yo is 9-years-worth less intelligent and less capable than a 12yo.

The core of what she's saying is totally fine, whatever the haters say.

Children don't have a blank check on your life. Mothers are not martyrs.

Not liking a particular way of spending time together is a perfectly valid reason to set a boundary and say no.

https://twitter.com/Komaniecki_R/status/1766989132935639269

There's a ton of nuance to *how* you say no that I think is really important. I don't know the context here, so I can't evaluate.

But just declining?

Ya, there's no rule in reality, or in child development in particular that says you need to play barbies together or whatever.

In conventional schools, kids often wait until 3rd grade or later to learn to multiply and divide large numbers

Think operations like: 5432 x 23 or 785 / 14

But in Montessori schools, kids learn this at ~5yo or even earlier. How is this possible? In Montessori, math is made concrete.

Specifically, kids use materials that clearly demonstrate the relationships between numbers in reality.

10 single beads create a string of 10. 10 strings create a 100 square. And 10 squares create a 1000 cube.

Here's a common critique of Montessori:

>Montessori rushes child development.

>Why do toddlers need to sweep the floor or wash windows? Why should 3-year-olds learn to read? Just let kids be kids!

There is something right and something *deeply wrong* with this critique: To disentangle, first notice that there are actually 3 questions at play:

1. Do Montessori children grow faster than those with more typical supports?

2. Do Montessori children grow faster than is *healthy*?

3. Are children *pressured* into these advanced achievements?

Most children are taught to read starting with the alphabet.

But this is incredibly abstract, and one major reason why learning to read is traditionally so miserable.

Montessori discovered a better way to build literacy, and it starts with *toddlers*: The foundation of reading is sounding out words.

This requires *more* than just memorizing the shape of letters on the page and connecting them to matching sounds.

It means recognizing that words are made up of sounds in the first place.

Why do I want to homeschool 8yo and 10yo next year?

Counterintuitively, my top reason has little to do with providing better academics.

It's this: homeschooling can provide *far superior* socialization. Socialization is a major concern of homeschooling skeptics.

After all, being in school means your kid will be around other kids for 6+ hours a day.

It seems impossible to provide equivalent, let alone superior, opportunities from home.

Everyone thinks they know what kids are like.

Rowdy and messy. Flitting from one activity to the next. Lost in a world of pretend.

But time and again, Maria Montessori found evidence of the exact opposite.

In the end, she concluded adults *don't know kids* at all: Montessori was a scientist, skeptical and severe.

She was not readily persuaded of this:

“It took time for me to convince myself that this was not an illusion. After each new experience proving such a truth, I said to myself, “I won’t believe yet, I’ll believe it next time.”

8yo was so excited to share what he learned in math class but once he explained, I was *livid*

Conventional schools don't care about real learning.

They only care about "hacks" that make it easier to fill in multiple choice bubbles on a test: In this case, 8yo learned that negative numbers work "the opposite" of positive numbers.

When you subtract, you get a "bigger" number, and when you add, you get a "smaller" number. -4 - 3 is -7 and -4 + 3 is -1 for example.

Seem innocent? It's not.