Back to School

Despite missing his entire second week at school, D's been doing really well this week.  Just jumped right back into the flow of things, even was super excited to stay the full day (till 2:30pm) and get to take a nap at school, which apparently really really exciting stuff.  When I dropped him off on Monday morning he seemed a bit nervous at first, until his teacher invited him to help her take their class bunny outside to the playground.  He then strode confidently away next to her, calling back to me, "I'm gonna go take the bunny outside, Mama."  Oh, my boy.  Just... swoon.

By chance, I came across a video today of Trevor Eissler (author of Montessori Madness, which I just today started reading after having the copy by my bedside for months now) talking about Montessori and how it compares to traditional education.  I've passed the video around on Twitter and Facebook, but for those of you who haven't seen it I hope you'll take the 5 minutes to do so now.  I think this video is an excellent short summation of the benefits of a Montessori education.  It served as a reminder to me of why I feel so strongly about wanting my children to attend Montessori.  

Our education system is broken and in dire need of a complete overhaul.  It's unfortunate and ironic, considering its roots, that Montessori schools tend to be private and thus too expensive for most families to consider. I hope one day we can tear our current education system down properly, and build it back up using a model like the Montessori method which we know (thanks to much research both on Montessori students specifically, and also in general on the factors that foster learning in children) is so much more in line with how children learn than traditional education.