Sacred Struggles of the Montessori Teacher

Catherine McTamaney, a Montessori teacher and writer, has completed a remarkable book: The Tao of Montessori.

In it she links the 81 verses of Lao-tzu's 25-century old Tao Te Ching with short essays on her life as a Montessori classroom teacher. The result is a series of meditations on the teacher's craft that will bring a knowing smile to the face of most Montessori teachers and those who appreciate them.

If, like some, you regret that Montessori too rarely in her writings appreciated the humanity of teachers-their creativity, their curiosity, their doubts-this book stands as the perfect complement.

McTamaney, the daughter of Amelia McTamaney, a Montessori teacher educator and former president of the International Association of Montessori Educators, is writing, raising two children with her husband, Brian, and completing a doctoral program at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

She was interviewed by Public School Montessorian editor Dennis Schapiro.

How would you describe the book?

It is about the basic goodness of Montessori teachers.

It's about sacred struggles .the strength that Montessori teachers develop in admitting their uncertainties and finding ways to honor children and maintain their own sanity.

There is something rebellious and idealistic and drenched in hope that we all carry. But ours can be an isolating and lonely practice. For all the joy of seeing children grow, we can get lost in the mundane and monotonous and malicious- and forget the idealism. It's not difficult to turn cynical.

My hope is to help teachers reconnect with the hope and decency that brought them to Montessori in the first place, even when the day-to-day challenges seem overwhelming. I want to remind people that they are part of a larger community.

But community or not, this is not easy work.

The last thing I want to do is pretend there are no challenges. It's OK to acknowledge those challenges. It could be that struggling with them is the only way we can move past them and rediscover our roots.

Your background?

I began in Montessori education 29 years ago, when I was finally old enough to attend the Montessori school at which my mother was a teacher. After she became the head of that school, the school began offering teacher education.

I was a Montessori student first, but even after I had transitioned to a conventional school, I was still surrounded by Montessorians. When the teacher education program was just getting off the ground, my house was filled with Montessorians from around the world. The conversations we had around the dinner table remain some of my favorite Montessori memories, being able to spend time with women who are now international leaders in the movement, being chided by them when I was awful to my parents and being encouraged by them when I spoke of becoming a teacher myself.

My teacher licensure is in secondary education, in large part because I thought Montessori was my mother's work, and thus wanted to avoid it! I came back to Montessori two years into my teaching career and took my formal Montessori training then. I completed my masters at the same time as my Montessori training, and was lucky to have been surrounded by professors at my university who allowed me to tweak a conventional program to include the Montessori perspective.

Having a foot in both worlds has helped?

I had seen a number of schools in action, as a student teacher, a public school teacher, a Montessori intern and finally a certified Montessori teacher and saw the same pervasive problems in each adult community.

We understood so well how to treat children, but we were really awful at treating each other as compassionately.

That disconnect between what we expect between teachers and children and what we are willing to offer each other as adults brought me back to the university setting again, where I have focused my research on how leadership and school climates intermingle.

Again, I have had the support of professors who were curious about Montessori and a program which was flexible enough to allow me to apply mainstream research to a unique Montessori setting, but I have still been challenged to reconcile policy-making with the complex lives of classrooms.

My life as a teacher helped to inform the questions I asked as a researcher. The book helped me come back from the perspective of academia to the language of classroom teachers.

Talk a little bit about the format. What's the connection between the two quotes-one from the Tao, one from Montessori?

I began writing the book as a way of thinking about the practice of Montessori after the birth of my first child. Out of the classroom and understanding what Montessori meant when she said, "Child life is not an abstraction," my son's birth helped to redefine my teaching and thinking about the Method.

My husband suggested the structure, in part, I suspect, to keep me focused.

The format was designed to give some credence to the words in the middle. I did not start with the two quotes. I began with the Tao chapters, found a small excerpt from each that gave me a direction for thinking about Montessori, and then sort of followed the writing to see where it took me.

That required a lot of trust in the teachers I've had, that what I have been taught would eventually be a reflection of Montessori's words.

When each essay was done, I went back to my Montessori texts to find the words to connect back in a more concrete way.

How difficult was the writing?

I put it down for a while when I got busy with parenting and teaching again and parenting a second time, and rediscovered it when I read about the Ursula Thrush Peace Seed Grant. The grant wasn't as important financially as it was in having other people put their eyes on the work and encourage me that it was worth pursuing.

I am grateful to Sonnie McFarland, Lesley Nan Haberman and Judi Bauerlein for telling me to push at the right time.

Some chapters were much easier to write than others. Some days were much more productive. Isn't that always the case?

There were some chapters, though, that even now I am not as resolved with.

The chapter on children and violence, for example, was painful to write and seems unfinished to me still.

A critic might question a 32-year-old doctoral candidate speaking for all Montessori teachers.

It's my experience. It's not intended to be a curriculum or a package, but the honest reflections of someone who has lived in Montessori for a while and who appreciates the beautiful complexity of this practice.

I think there is a "real" Montessori connection with any belief system that is based first on compassion. We're all describing the same elephant.

The structure of the book is one that anyone could undertake, I think-to begin with something other than Montessori and write or think or speak from one's heart and experiences, and then check yourself again against what you've been taught as a Montessorian.

What is the state of Montessori teaching?

We've all come to Montessori for the right reasons, and that's reflected in the great work that teachers do every day. But there are issues that make this work more challenging, issues that we can't ignore. The lives of schools are too busy and the demands on teachers too great.

I think many teachers are isolated within their own schools, implementing this practice as they were trained to do, without meaningful connection to how the teacher next door is doing it.

I fear that in order to train more teachers, we've watered down the demands that we have of student teachers and in so doing, left them less prepared to implement Montessori well. In many ways, the communities of public school teachers that I've observed are more supportive, because there's a real urgency to accomplish something.

Our movement is marked by territorialism. It's a positive step to see the national organizations working together more collaboratively, but we are lacking in grassroots leadership.

If our goal is truly to protect as many children as possible, we have to be more supportive of each other's work.

The Tao of Montessori is available through Amazon.com or iUniverse.com.