What It Was Like At Montessori School

Writing a series of ascending numbers on adding machine tape somehow counted as math in my Montessori class, and so I applied myself diligently to this, wearing my pencils down to nubs (at which point they would become ‘baby’ pencils, and I would make them little tissue beds inside their little eraser and glue stick houses inside my desk where they could be cared for by longer, sharper ‘parent’ pencils).

But whenever instructed to translate my understanding of division to on-paper arithmetic, as was inevitable, there would often ensue screaming fights that resulted in me being banished to the hall, where I would lie on a black bench and cry about how abused and unfortunate I was. Sometimes I would face the slats of the bench’s back, wrap my hands around them, and pretend I was behind the bars of a prison, some kind of secret jail where the Math Kingdom permanently interred writers. It was a little disappointing when my imprisonment ended and I had to return, cried out and much calmer, to the friendly little classroom.

Even when I was too old for temper tantrums I remained willful, devoting myself to the study of just about everything but the hated mathematics; I picked out which figures from the Black History Calendar looked the kindest and did reports about them. I picked out which deities from ancient Rome and Greece had the most interesting powers and gave illustrated presentations about them. I faithfully recreated geographic maps on furry, camel-soft manila paper with colored pencil. To this day when I see the post Soviet Union Russia on a modern map I am a little disoriented. I can’t pick out the individual countries and I remember just scribbling and scribbling blue colored pencil over the enormous, unending ‘USSR’.

I think people eventually stopped attempting to foist mathematic materials on me; I have a memory of using them as play blocks or architectural mockups, but never as math tools. I did like science; when I asked my sixth grade science teacher to order me a dead fetal pig from a science catalog so that I could dissect it for my science fair project, he agreed. I correctly and effectively disassembled my pig without supervision and often alongside my lunch.

I felt very proud of myself. Needing to adapt to the social and academic order of a normal proper public school a year later would be absolutely ruinous, but overall I did all right in Montessori school – even despite that period when our teacher wanted to teach us about the heritage of her Japanese husband and what I took away from it was how to make paper cranes.

I wanted to make a thousand paper cranes like in the book “Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes.” I got to nine hundred something before I got bored.

These days I count on my fingers and whisper multiplication tables under my breath when I’m calculating. I use calculators for simple whole-number addition, just to be safe. Every time I write financial articles at my job it takes like three colleagues to triple-check them. Whenever I’m called out on my total mathematic ineptitude, I blame Montessori and I say something like, “maybe I should go to an adult learning center,” something that sounds mature and positive that I know I’ll never do.

I think about one of those times back in third grade when I got banished to the black hall bench. The other class teacher came into the hall probably because my crying was disturbing her class. Her name was Mrs. Woolston. She had a foreign accent but I can’t remember from where. I remember her as tall and white-haired, with old-fashioned dresses and a reputation for being very strict, but I always saw her as one of the smart nanny figures from my fantasy stories, or one of the great and powerful witches from the Madeleine L’Engle books I read and rubbed raw on the playground in the hopes that they would let me inside them.

I remember Mrs. Woolston asking me what had happened and me explaining I was in trouble because I hated math. And she must have told me to buck up, or something, because everybody has to do things they don’t want to do sometimes.

I remember telling her, “I wish you were my teacher.”

I can’t remember if she sat beside me or stood over me. In my memory she is so big, and she sounded kind when she told me, “No, you don’t want me for your teacher. I’m much stricter than your teacher and I’d never let you get away with this kind of thing.”

And I sighed and through my tears I insisted, “I wish you were my teacher. Can you please become my teacher.”

She said no and told me to calm down and go back to my classroom and I did. I feel weirdly emotional remembering that time.