I love the Sunday funnies. Give me the color comics and a perfectly made cappuccino and I am guaranteed 30 minutes of bliss – and some occasional pearls of wisdom. Two weeks ago, there was one such pearl in the strip Mutts by Patrick McDonnell.
The scene involves two cats, Jules and Mooch, and a dog, Earl. Jules is writing on a pad of paper. (He is an uncommonly intelligent cat who, “gives great hugs, and wants to teach the world to purr.”) Jules tells his friends that he has “started an endangered list.” When Earl asks what is on the list, Jules replies, “Empathy, compassion, kindness, sympathy, decency, sensitivity, integrity, altruism, affection, benevolence, heart, tenderness, love, humanity, charity, grace, courtesy, tolerance, mercy, intelligence, leniency, understanding, common sense, goodwill, patience, wisdom…” When I read that, my heart ached a little. Are all of those traits and practices truly endangered or is it just that those stories don’t make the news reports?
Seeing the Good Stuff
It put me in mind of how difficult it is in our own classrooms to see what is going well. We have a vision in our head, probably placed there in our training, of what a Montessori classroom is supposed to look like. On a daily basis, our attention is drawn to everything that is discordant with that vision. We see the mess, the arguments, the lack of grace and courtesy, the posers-with-work, the wanderers. Do we see the child who freely chooses work without prompting? Do we see the children who are successfully collaborating? Those that are finding joy in their work? Those who are excited about lessons? Do we see the children who are so absorbed in work that they have achieved flow?
Countless authors have written about what some call the Law of Attraction – the idea that what we experience in life is affected or determined by where we place our attention. We get what we focus on. If our thoughts are primarily about everything that is wrong with us or our classroom or the world, we will see everything that is wrong and miss out on many of the things that are right. If that is true, developing the ability to see what is going well is of paramount importance, for us and for those around us.
Adjusting Our Vision
Seeing the good is a task that is easier said than done! It is like the old chestnut, “Don’t think of a giraffe.” Did you think of a giraffe? Of course, you did! Just so, if we set out to not-focus on the flaws, we will still see everything that is going poorly, and may erroneously conclude that nothing is going well. We have to intentionally choose to look for what is going well. But where to start?
One place to begin is with whatever practices we have been encouraging in our classrooms. Have you been working on decreasing interruptions to your lessons? Perhaps create a tally for every lesson in which you are able to give full focus to the students attending the lesson. Has the class been working on taking less than 30 minutes to clean up at the end of the day? Time how long clean-up takes each day for a week. If you like, you can even turn that into a graphing activity for the children.
Alternatively, we can begin with Jules’ list. It is a good one. There are many traits and practices on his list that are integral to a Montessori community! The first one, empathy, is a characteristic of Normalization (what Montessori called sociability). Two traits, grace and courtesy, are foundational to the Montessori environment. We can make it our goal to focus on a particular trait or practice each week, noting each time we see it in action in our classrooms. Or we can take it one step farther by turning it into a class project.
The Class Project
To prepare for this activity, choose 4-5 traits that you think children could readily observe in your classroom. Discuss what each of those 4-5 words means with the children. Invite children to add any positive character traits that they feel are important to the classroom culture. Design a system for children to anonymously report sightings of those traits throughout the week. This might involve writing the event on a specially designated flip-chart page or whiteboard, or writing it on a post-it and placing it on a designated spot on the wall or window, or even writing it on a ping-pong ball and putting it into a large, empty distilled water jug.
Reflection for Children (and Adults)
In the comic strip Mutts, Jules, the cat, is creating a long, long list of positive character traits that he thinks are endangered. These are character traits that we value in Montessori classrooms – we don’t want them to be endangered or extinct! We want to nurture them so that they can grow and multiply! The best way to do that may be to give them our energy and attention!
We discussed a few traits that we can see in use if we watch for them. Please choose 2-3 from the list that you think are most important to our classroom community. Write those traits and what they mean to you. Please be as specific as possible, giving an example if you can. Throughout the week, you will be watching for those traits. Every time you see it happening, write what happened or was said without naming any names. At the end of the week, we will see how we feel about our results. Did focusing on these good things actually help them happen more frequently and/or are we happier because that is what we are noticing?
Note: if the children really catch fire in this activity, consider repeating it again the following week with some traits added or replaced. In the process, you will also be building the children’s vocabulary!
“… whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, let your mind dwell on these things.”
– Philippians 4:8
“Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.”
– Phillips Brooks, author, lyricist, clergyman