Education privée

I have lots of pictures to share of Little S's room and all the hard work I've put into the paint and woodwork. He still hasn't fully moved back in but he will soon, just as soon asI paint a few pieces of furniture and put together his new bookshelf.

Meanwhile on top of all of this renovating business and cleansing the house I'm starting to look around at private schools for Little S. The public school is okay and he loves his class, but even S's teacher admitted to us that a child like him needs more individual attention than the public system can offer him. It's fine now while he's still in kindergarten but next year when he starts elementary school she's told us he'll likely fall behind unless he gets help. So I'm just sort of window shopping in the private sector, but in all likelihood he'll start CP next year in the public school with the rest of his friends and we'll see how it goes.

On Saturday the Montessori school, practically in our backyard, had an open house in the morning and I visited just for the heck of it. I figured if I start work in the Fall we can afford it and even though it would be nearly half my measely salary it would be worth it. I think I'd probably built this school up into something else, probably because Little S's school in Mexico was so chic and gorgeous and the directrice was a dynamic pistol really passionate about her school. She sold Montessori like street vendors in Mexico sell rare trinkets. In fifteen minutes we were convinced there was no way he couldn't go there! We enrolled him right away after the first meeting.

Saturday was an entirely different story. The school was freezing, so cold I had to keep my winter hat and coat on. There was no coffee or snacks and in my mind I'd already said to myself "I can't drink too much coffee or I'll have to pee! oh well at least I can check out the toilets when I pee" But there was no coffee or water or anything. Okay maybe not entirely necessary but an important welcome gesture if you ask me. I was the last to walk in and there were about a dozen cold parents sitting in a circle, huddled around a table of materials. They were staring at their shoes, clearing their throats and listening to a low-talking director drone on and on and ON about the problems with public schools. Every once in a while he'd pick up a very worn out Montessori cube and explain it to the parents in minute detail, but who could hear because he was mumbling so much? And then for no reason he'd start talking about something completely different. The plants in the schoool were all dead or in the process of dying a slow death, frozen no doubt and the desks were all worn with broken or missing parts. Most of the furniture was mismatched, cheap plastic and the walls were plastered in tattered, half hung posters from years gone by. There was a huge, nasty television in every room with video tapes stacked nearby (groan) and in one room the mess was so bad that there was an overflowing garbage sac on the floor, papers spilling out, that we actually had to daintily step around to go into the classrom. "Voila c'est notre petit école!" the director kept saying sticking his chest out. The whole school was like this though, "a petit mess".

It was one of those moments in my life where I said "I can do better than this." You know those moments where you see someone doing something you love and doing it badly. I said to myself "I'd love to have this school. I could do this so much with it." I left the school with some badly photocopied papers (first impressions people) and a big question mark over my head. All the other parents stayed behind to ask more questions, apparently interested (bigger question mark), but I was eager to leave.

a typical Montessori classroom found randomly on the internet--lots of light, plants, wood furniture, clean...and most likely WARM. This is what I'd had built up in my head but it wasn't at all like this...

Later I told my neighbor about it. She has her son in a private school nearby and she said "oh yeah they're all like that. Dimi's school too." It didn't seem to bother her. I think for the amount of money you pay they could at least clean and organize the schools. For me the learning environment should be really nice. I always reorganized the classrooms I worked in, took old things off the walls and tried to clean up. It motivated ME as a teacher. In Montessori one of the main principles is that the school is beautiful, --they're often filled with plants and usually have nice, wood furniture to help the kids learn to love and respect the learning environment. The kids in a Montessori school even help raise and care for the plants and I believe they clean the help clean the classroom too. It certainly wasn't the case in this school. All I could think of was poor Little S if he had to go here. He'd end up like those plants!

I'm curious to see some of the other private schools in the area. I wonder if they're all such a mess like my neighbor says. If that's the case then no thanks. I'd rather home school.