To Montessori or Not To Montessori

That is the question!

In a previous post, I said that we were looking for a pre-school for our daughter and wanted it to be a Montessori-like school. Well, guess what! We visited 4 of them this week and frankly I wasn’t impressed. All of them were highly recommended by the parents at Microsoft and are schools with a very good reputation. One thing I have to point out is that not all the Montessori schools were the same. In fact, I felt that each subsequent school that we visited was better than the previous one.

No it’s not the schools that were bad per say. It’s the Montessori method that I didn’t like. Montessori is the in-thing these days, and parents rave about the method. Criticism is hard to find. And not without valid reasons – Montessori has a great sounding philosophy around individual freedom and seems to be a great method to build a child’s academic expertise. But I found the curriculum far too structured, rigid and dry. As a three year old, I want my daughter to play, sing, dance, paint, pretend, share and not count beads, or pour water from one cup to the other.

There was one piece of feedback that really sums up my thoughts and I am quoting it here:

I did not put my sons in Montessori preschools. I found the Montessori approach too structured for my children. Yes, every child moves at his/her own rate, but he/she moves through a particular set of exercises. Those exercises are a set of manipulatives that the child must learn to use in one particular way. The method was devised for children coming from disadvantaged backgrounds in the early 1900′s and focused on common daily tasks. My children’s house has brooms and dishes and pitchers, and they don’t need specific instruction in preschool about them.

For my son, I wanted more free-form art projects, fantasy play, group play, and no academics. I found that in the non-Montessori schools. The preschool program was very “hands on” and there were no desks.

The other criticism I have is that the Montessori curriculum is too individual based. While it is important to build an independent, self-sufficient individual, there is a reduced emphasis on working together, sharing or group play. In fact the Montessori method encourages children to work on their own projects individually and the teacher tries to dissuade other children from collaborating. When we were observing a Montessori classroom, all children with sitting quietly on their own working on their own little project. While that skill is important in life, that’s not a structure I want to impose on my daughter this early on. One point to confess though is that this approach is not common to all schools. As we progressed through visiting schools, the later schools were more open to group activities than the former ones. However, in spite of some schools encouraging group work, the Montessori curriculum is always designed around an individual. Secondly, I found the dryness of the material and the instruction a bit unsettling. My daughter was perfectly happy trying to make coffee with the bottles that she was given to unscrew the lids of. That kind of imaginative and creative play seems very lacking in the Montessori materials.

And I don’t believe that a particular kind of pre-school has any kind of impact on future performance. While Montessori children might know their squares and cubes before they enter first grade and that may be quite impressive, I think other pre-school kids do just as well as long as they acquire the basic foundation needed for school. So right now my focus would be to look at non-Montessori schools where the activities are more free-flowing and where imagination and creativity are more important than learning academic skills. I may still be convinced to send her to a Montessori as long as it is for no more than half day (and in fact the last school that we visited actually offered a mix of both Montessori and free-form classrooms which was far more appealing to me).

A New Year, A New Gig

Next week, I’ll be starting with a new job with the social networking startup Ning.com. It was a fun year and a half at my previous company, a small 10 person startup. Learned a lot of new things, lived through many changes. Heck, we even threw our old system, GUI and business model out of the window and built all of them anew from scratch within a span of 6 months. Now that the company is a bit more stable and is starting to do better with its new business model, I felt it was time for me to move on to greater challenges.

There were lots of things that I loved about working in a startup environment – high productivity and very few distractions to prevent you from getting work done, no meetings to sleep during, being able to get things done and make progress really fast without any upper management bureaucracy, interesting colleagues and a small team dynamic, everyone has to hunker down an produce and there isn’t any place to hide, a very cooperative rather than competitive work environment. And there are numerous things from Amazon that I’ll gladly do without – on call rotation, stress and burn out during Nov – Dec, spending a great deal of time on support & operations rather than building software, the dismal employee benefits, a huge difficulty in getting things done that require cooperation across multiple teams, 3 hour team lead meetings every Wed where you couldn’t open your laptops and had to pore through pages and pages of high severity issues from the week. But there are definitely things that I still miss – the larger tech community, interesting and challenging problems and how every problem becomes difficult when you operate at the Amazon scale, knowledge from experienced engineers and principals, amongst others.

Hopefully Ning will fall somewhere in between the two ends of the spectrum. It is still a startup and has a similar environment, but it has been successful enough to start having many of the challenges that running a large scale system has. Plus, it is larger than my previous company allowing for a substantially larger pool of engineers to interact with. It seems like a number of ex-Amazonians have flocked to Ning, and it definitely should be an interesting place to work for a few years. Whether it will be my dream job or not remains to be seen.

With these thoughts, I quit my job on the 31st and have been relaxing at home for almost 2 weeks (Yeah, I know my blog needs an update and I am working on it). Starting Tue the 19th (yes MLK day is an holiday – get that you Amazonians) I’ll be in Palo Alto for a couple of weeks before returning to the new office in Seattle. Anyone who is in the Bay Area and wants to get in touch (and has read this far) give me a hoot.

In Search of a Pre-school

Last week Smita & I started searching for a pre-school for our daughter. She will turn 3 in July and we want her to join some school in Fall of 2010. She goes to an excellent day care right now, but we have a feeling that she’s starting to get a bit too old for that place and a pre-school setting would help her more.

The search is turning out to be quite daunting, especially when we don’t even know what we are looking for in a school. We just went to one of the open houses on Saturday and I still haven’t formed an opinion on the school. The main requirement would be proximity to home or work, but beyond that everything would be fair game. We are visiting 4 more schools this week and so hopefully some comparisons will make things a bit clearer.

The other problem is a lack of feedback on the schools. Most schools do a good job of marketing themselves, but real reviews are hard to obtain. There is no Amazon.com for schools where you can just go and read what other parents thought about these schools. Most of the feedback that we’ve gathered is from the parents email list at Microsoft and so far it has been helpful for us to narrow our list down to the schools that we will be visiting but not much more beyond that.

As far as the nature of the school is concerned, I am looking for a more child-centered, Montessori-like school. Having been to a Montessori myself I feel that it is more developmentally appropriate for children of this age rather than a classroom style academic school. The later type of schools have a tendency of burning out kids too soon or increasing childhood anxiety due to undue emphasis on achievement.  At this age, I would want a school which would nurture her natural curiosity and build a sense of initiative and self-esteem rather than teach things. The school should help children problem solve, cooperate, improve social interaction etc. Academic subjects may be learned as long as the child is ready for them and not taught in a formal manner. Though, I expect some sort of balance between learning and free play and that the free play is guided to help the child learn various aspects of life.

Of course, not all Montessori schools are built the same and a lot depends on the individual teachers more so than the school. Moreover some schools are more dogmatic in their approach than others. But let’s see where this search leads us and what we find. And it is definitely a lot of work trying to gather and assimilate information about these schools into a coherent opinion.