It's a Small World

After All





There is just one moon
and one golden sun . . .







A funny thing happened in Room 28 last week: Mrs. Corona visited.

Mrs. Corona was my teacher when I was my students’ age. She spoke quietly, moved peacefully, and never lost her calm demeanor. She was patient with my day-dreamy, slow-as-molasses work habits and the horribly disorganized innards of my desk and my penchant for drawing pictures on everything, including the pages of my math booklets. Intensely shy and quiet, I loved to learn. Each new lesson felt like a gift. I loved reading SRAs and wrote long, detailed stories (my mother still has one--filed away somewhere--about doing the Checkerboard with my friend Chelly). Mrs. Corona smelled of coffee and perfume, and in the afternoons she read aloud from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods. I could almost taste the maple candy Grandma and Laura made in the snow. At Christmas, Mrs. Corona gave each of us a handmade ornament, and for Mother’s Day we painted tiny glass bottles. It was in her class that I experienced my first British tea party. At the end of the school year, when she gave away gently-used supplies, my gift was the set of watercolors I hardly ever got to use because I never finished enough work.

Well, this week, Mrs. Corona came to observe my classroom. Our school district has contracted with the Montessori training center to do an evaluation of our public Montessori programs. Each Montessori-certified teacher in the district was visited for an observation, and Mrs. Corona was scheduled to visit my classroom . . . in the middle of May . . . two weeks before the last day of school!

I’ve wanted her to visit because I’m proud of what we do in our classroom. But if you’ve been reading here regularly, you know how I feel about May. It is perhaps the last month I would choose for anyone to observe, particularly my teacher who has been doing the job I do now for over thirty years. We all start to lose our grip on peaceful work in May. There is craziness in the hallways, our usually predictable schedule is repeatedly interrupted, and we all hear the Siren call of summer. It seemed like an unfair amount of pressure to tell the children that my very own elementary school teacher was visiting. So I didn’t—and hoped for the best. I merely explained that a teacher of Montessori teachers was coming to watch our peaceful, hard-working classroom—and quietly hoped that that is indeed what she would see.

By some miracle—thanks, I think, to the pride the children take in our peaceful classroom community and perhaps partly as a gift of kindness on their part—the children managed to pull off one more morning of peaceful work.

After Mrs. Corona left, I told the children that she had been my Montessori teacher when I was their age. They were less surprised than I expected. One child commented that she had been a very peaceful visitor. Another piped up, “Well, then I’ll need to get your phone number, Ms. S., because I want you to come watch my classroom when I’m a teacher.”
I look forward to that call!

“Though the mountains divide . . . And the oceans are wide . . . It's a small, small world.”



Image courtesy of Bruins Montessori