Montessori school visit

Today my wife and I visited a Montessori school. The school's location is far from ideal, so on our way there I thought "It must be really really good for us to even consider taking our kids here every day." As a matter of fact, I thought it was so unlikely that I felt a bit embarrassed taking the time of the school to show us what they offered.

The minute I entered the classroom I was so moved that I found myself fighting my tears. What I saw was unbelievable. No flyers, no websites, no testimonies could ever have convinced me that this was possible. Can you imagine 28 toddlers in a classroom all working quietly and diligently on their projects? They were all exploring things. Some were helping others. None of them were fighting. None of them were screaming. They all cleaned up after themselves. And it all was so natural. Natural discipline. No force whatsoever. Stunningly beautiful.

I can imagine you would not believe this. I would not have. Seeing it happen right in front of me convinced me that this was what I wanted more than anything in my life. And I realized how clumsy the regular schools are where they force all children to learn the same thing at the same time, ignoring the interests and talents of the precious individual human beings that the schools are meant to serve. It's no surprise that lots of time and energy at regular schools gets wasted keeping everyone in line. I realized how silly my prejudice was that children would not learn anything useful if they were left to choose. The children I saw were all under six years of age and several of them were working with numbers and letters. Some were spelling words. I did not learn any of that before I was seven.

Afterwards I spoke with my wife, who had been observing in another classroom. She had had the same experience and the same emotions. We share the same conviction. We will do anything we can to make this possible for our children. We will be strong and work hard. And we will love it.

Two and counting!

Yesterday Natalie finally managed to count apple bites correctly. A couple of months ago she was able to recognize the numbers one through eleven but she had little understanding of counting: Whenever I asked her to count some items, she'd point at them randomly and say one, two, three, etc. Sometimes she would stop at the right number but most often she would not.

This weekend I showed her that she could move one apple bite to the side with each number. And repeatedly she was able to figure out the right number. It made us both happy: me because she could count and her because she got so many apple bites.

About fourty years ago I delighted my father by listing all powers of two up to 8192. To show his appreciation he gave me some money. It was the first money I ever earned. Years later I got my master's in math. So today I gave Natalie a present: a jigsaw puzzle of Thomas the tank engine.

Can't wait to teach her differential equations!

Because actually probably

One of the juiciest parts of being a father is seeing my children develop skills. Natalie's vocabulary is growing rapidly. She picks up words everywhere and tries to use them in sentences. Nowadays she hardly says any sentence without one of the words 'actually,' 'probably,' and 'because' in them. When she tells me a story she does it with conviction and full of confidence. She looks me straight in the eyes and I look back and I just listen because probably she likes me to, actually.