I'm beginning this whole teacher's blog thing entirely on a whim. It started off with a phrase I read in a very unlikely and unrelated place-- Kate Summerscale's "Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The private diary of a Victorian lady". Summerscale's book is a tale of an unhappy marriage and the mores of the Victorian middle/upper classes. The eponymous Mrs. Robinson is the coordinates her own downfall by writing a diary of her "alleged" affair with Darwin's doctor of all people. Had she not been stricken by what the Roman poet Juvenal referred to as "cacoethes scribendi," a persistent and insatiable urge to write, she might not have suffered the fate she had-- relatively destitute, utterly disgraced, and childless.
Unlike Mrs. Robinson, however, my own cacoethus scribendi has taken some time to manifest itself in this blog. What teacher has time to write anything in addition to rubrics, lesson plans, project guidelines, etc.? Better teachers than I, obviously.
As I finish my Montessori training (for 12-18 yo-- the adolescent classroom), I'm realizing more and more that there are very few Montessori adolescent teacher blogs out there. And there are none in my discipline (however integrated Montessori is, we still have to have disciplines-- how could one person even try to have all of that specialized knowledge in one brain?) of foreign language (i.e., currently Spanish).
Hopefully, I can bring something useful to the table as regards Montessori and the future of education, or at the very least reflect well enough on my teaching practice that I can learn from my mistakes and my successes in equal measure.
