Schoolroom Set-Up

Here's how the school room started at the beginning of the year - I realized I took these before I tidied up for the evening.

Math shelves are on the left, book rack (I love this thing so much - it was an awesome $10 craigslist score, but, honestly, the kids totally ignore the books in it! argh!), mirror and DIY mobile for Felix (which was quickly destroyed by Lucy), Lucy's shelves with practical life and sensorial works mostly on the right. The kitchen is up through that window, so in theory, some day, I can work in the kitchen and keep an eye on the kids diligently working independently.

Another angle on the math shelves, with our "learning basket" of read-alouds on top (we actually read these out to the couch, but they live in here), and a basket of work mats to the right. The schoolroom doubles as our home office, which is not recommended by Montessori-at-home experts, and, in fact, has proven to be a bit of a distraction.

Beyond Lucy's shelves are language materials.

This all worked great for a little while, but Felix is now quite mobile, so schoolroom times have been fairly chaotic of late - time to make some adjustments. The table also was too small for both big kids to work at simultaneously and really too small for Joseph generally, so it has been moved to Lucy's room, and I'm on the hunt for a replacement.

The Angelic Doctor as Teacher

The main branch of the Memphis Public Library has a great little used book shop run by the Friends of the Library where I recently picked up Pieper's Guide to Thomas Aquinas. Some insights from the chapter on St. Thomas as teacher - first, his very different notions from the idea that "those who can't, teach":

Teaching, says Thomas, is one of the highest manifestations of the life of the mind, for the reason that in teaching the vita contemplativa and the vita activa are joined--not just patched together superficially, not merely connected "factually," but united in a natural and necessary union. The true teacher has grasped a truth for itself, by purely receptive contemplation; he passes it on to others who likewise desire to partake of this truth. The teacher, then, looks to the truth of things; that is the contemplative aspect of teaching. It is also the aspect of silence, without which the words of the teacher would be unoriginal in the primary meaning of that word, would be empty talk, gesture, chatter, if not fraud. But the teacher simultaneously looks into the faces of living human beings--and he subjects himself to the rigorously disciplined, wearisome labor of clarifying, of presenting, of communicating. Where this communication does not take place, teaching does not take place. 

This next bit reminds me of Dan Willingham's suggestion that too often today our educational system attempts to teach novices as if they were already experts:

Precisely this characterizes the teacher, it seems to me: he possesses the art of approaching his subject from the point of view of the beginner; he is able to enter into the psychological situation of one encountering a subject for the first time.

...[this art] is a fruit of love, of loving devotion to the learner, of loving identification of the teacher with the beginner. 

So, here we've been told the two things the teacher needs to contemplate and then communicate: silence and love. Silence is required to receive the truth, and love to attend to the person of the learner and to persevere through the "wearisome labor" of communicating what has been received to them. Makes a useful framework for assessing the first stretch of our school year.

Thus, the more intensively and the more passionately a man engages in these two activities [contemplation and communication], the more he is a teacher. On the one hand, there is his relationship with truth, the power of silent listening to reality; on the other hand, there is his affirmative concern for his audience and his pupils. And we may say that Thomas personally accomplished both these activities with extraordinary intensity.

St. Thomas, ora pro nobis!

 

Spaghetti Squash Marinara

Definitely our favorite restaurant thus far in Memphis is Hog and Hominy. So I kind of impulse-bought their new cookbook when I saw it at Costco a few weeks back, figuring it would be totally worth it if only the peanut butter pie recipe was in there - and I must have been right because Bob, otherwise pretty unsure why we need all those cookbooks, totally agreed.

Well, the pie recipe IS there, along with their collard greens, a bunch of fancy pastas, and a recipe for making tonic (!!!) from scratch. But more practically, this spaghetti squash marinara.

Next time: use bigger pot