I really, really like it.
I think it reinforces the kids natural curiosity.
In middle school, my first year out of Montessori, I was shocked at how little other kids cared about learning. I remember the teacher discussing something about astronomy, and I raised my hand to comment on some fact I had read, and what followed was mockery by my peers and antipathy by the teacher. I learned quickly to never again show that I cared about learning.
This was a huge contrast with Montessori where most us were eager to learn and share what we had learned. I had friends that had built the solar system to scale out of their own initiative (in hindsight they may have taken some liberties, nonetheless).
I kept tabs more or less my classmates that came out of the Montessori, and I think they overall overperformed the non Montessori people in middle school and high school. Harder to gauge adulthood success.
I also liked that they had children of various years in the same classroom. I think it promoted knowledge sharing from the older kids to the younger ones, and it removed barriers for friendships. Some of my best friends back then where older than I was. That would never happen in middle or high school.
Finally, I don't think it's perfect. Because we were all expected to join a traditional school after grade 6, the school made some effort to make sure that the outgoing class had covered all the basic requirements (a not necessarily a simple thing since we had great liberty of pursuing what was interesting to us).
All in all, I would strongly recommend it.
There was a non-verbal autistic kid there, too. I played "clap-hands" with them every day, apparently the only human interaction (apart from their parents) that they had.
We moved when I was 5, and I went to a normal school after that. I don't remember much about it (all the above is stories my parents told me later). Luckily we moved to a small village where the teacher had enough time to continue giving me the personalised attention I clearly needed. Then I got shipped off to boarding school and the rest of my schooling is a dark, terrible mess of anger and violence.
It totally worked for me. I hated school, except that one.
As most Montessori schools are private, my impression is that the variance in the quality of Montessori implementation varies considerably, but at a high level I have positive views of many of the same method characteristics as other comments:
- mixed-age classes
- learner-driven scheduling/work
- non-test-centric evaluation
- etc.
- independence in both learning/working and life in general
- love of learning
- kindness towards others
- are you accredited by AMS, AMI and/or SAIS?
- are your teachers trained primarily through AMS or AMI?
- how long have your teachers been with the school, on average?
- where do students go after this school, and what are their outcomes (what colleges, high school honor graduates, etc.)?
- does the school do standardized testing that is accepted by the local school district or otherwise make it easy to transition to other schools after they age out?- mixed aged group classrooms. So in one year of the 3 year cycle, he is the younger child (and receives mentorship from his older buddies), and in year 3 of each cycle, he is the older buddie mentoring younger pupils. Since he has no siblings, this is a benefit to his development.
- Montessori follow the state curriculum, however they allow children to manage their own time. So if he wants to do math all day, he can, and the teacher is there more for project management and giving him assistance than to drive him by a strict 45 minute schedule. At the end of the week, he is supposed to accomplish the assigned work (regardless of which order he wants to do it in). This will help him in the future with his own project management and prioritising work loads (we hope).
- the parents sending their kids to Montessori are not of the Elitist breed. I wont explain what I mean by that here. Its better than Steiner type schools (my personal opinion).
Other than the above, there wasn't anything particular about Montessori compared regular State run schools.
As others have pointed out, the Montessori program is strong, but the execution is everything.
FWIW my wife, who is in her 40s, regularly visits her Montessori campus when visiting her hometown, and is friends with several of her classmates from the time, all of whom might give you the impression that Montessori is some sort of MLM thing to judge by their unbridled enthusiasm.
EDIT - we plan to start our child in public kindergarten, because money. Tough choice, but that $12k isn't peanuts to us.
+ Love of learning and self-driven discovery
+ Top of class in pretty much all subjects
+ Comfortable giving presentations
+ Comfortable working in groups
+ At ease working with younger students/children and essentially mentoring them
+ Excellent handwriting
+ Respect for teachers
- Difficulty with testing that involves framing the questions in an intentionally deceptive manner
- Difficult transition to the cliques and more aggressive social dynamics of public school
- Tough for them to deal with the way many students treat their teachers and behave in general in public school
I would recommend, that a year or 2 before the kids transition they start doing standardized tests and worksheets to get acclimated to that. It's a big shock otherwise.
Overall my kids loved their time in Montessori and wish the program had gone through high school.
I agree that it did well to set my up academically. I ended up going to middle/high schools that were relatively average academically, so I was pretty strong in all subjects in comparison to my peers. Ultimately I went to a very prestigious college and now work in a wonderful finance job I love. However in the many years of therapy I’ve had as an adult, I continue to identify Montessori school as a foundational contributor to my social anxiety, and ultimately my ensuing clinical depression over a lack of social life which haunted most of my college years.
My Montessori school had about 15-25 kids / class year. Some of the larger years were split into two groups with separate teachers. Every year, maybe one or two kids left to go to other schools and one or two new kids joined, but for the most part I grew up with the same core set of children for seven years. I honestly believe this had a permanent negative effect on my ability to socialize and form new friendships that I am only barely beginning to correct over a decade later. Admittedly I did not participate in any extracurricular outside of Montessori school (particularly because it had its own after-school programs). So when I transitioned to a public school for middle/high school, it was a sharp culture shock and I definitely struggled to fit in.
I think Montessori schools are worthwhile academically, but you should be careful to keep your children in contact with other kids outside the Montessori bubble.
The main difference was how much more challenging Montessori education was. The teachers really observed me and how I performed on assignments, and they could tell when I needed more of a challenge, and assign something to me that was just at the edge of what I was able to do. In the traditional education, if I consistently just did the bare minimum expected of everyone, I was a double-plus A plus student.
I was also allowed to explore subjects that interested me in greater depth, as long as it didn't come at the expense of subjects I found less interesting. I learned a lot of English and maths in the first few years!
If I had a disagreement with a Montessori teacher, we would sit down together and have a mature conversation about it and reach some sort of mutually beneficial solution (yes, even when I was under the age of 10!) In the more traditional education, there was the assumption that if I disagreed with the teacher, I was wrong and should shut up. (I ended up not passing a few classes in the traditional school because of disagreements with the teacher – I simply stopped attending the class at that point. Didn't seem productive to go on.)
I also had a lot more spare time in the Montessori school. As long as I did well on the work assigned to me and didn't bother my classmates, the teachers didn't really care how I spent my time. I could sit in a corner and read or do long multiplication, or go out and kick around a soccer ball. I would like to think this helped me learn independence.
On the other hand, I also have a notable lack of respect for authority figures. I like to think this is good, but it has also gotten me into trouble for disagreeing with hardline managers, refusing to do things I think are unethical, etc. I think some of this can be attributed to the Montessori school, where respect was based on fact, rational argument, and patient listening, rather than who should be commanding whom.
However, transitioning back to traditional schooling was extremely painful, and sadly it never got easier. I hated the rest of my school experience, from 9th grade until basically the end of college.
In Montessori, when it was time to learn a new subject, I'd have a brief, one-on-one conversation with the teacher to get oriented, and then after 10-20 minutes, they'd set me loose to apply the ideas on my own until I mastered the material.
Compared to that freedom, ordinary classrooms were miserable. Trapped, listening to lectures for 45+ minutes at a time before I was able to get my hands dirty and try anything out. And if I caught on early in a lecture, that made things even worse! Now I had to sit there for a half hour and listen to a teacher explain something I already understood—to no one's benefit. I'm getting worked up just thinking of it. Suffice it to say that moving at the pace of the slowest person in the class was torture for my ADHD brain. Montessori spoiled me and I never really reacclimatized.
I don't have any advice except that for some people (like me) Montessori works extremely well, and for many others, it doesn't work well at all. But if it works well, then transitioning back to regular schooling can be tough.
I loved it. The teachers let me teach an art and drawing class in 2nd grade. Another student taught an algebra class (he's a brilliant cancer researcher now). I co-wrote, illustrated, and sold a comic book with another classmate in 4th grade during class time.
It allowed me to complete the curriculum on my own time and held me accountable.
Montessori was something I made my own, not something that was happening to me.
The transition out wasn't that bad. I did 5th grade again (June baby) at a standard private school. The biggest things: - I had never written a formal essay, or an essay outline. - I had never taken nor prepared for a real test
Like others here, I never really enjoyed school as much after Montessori.
For the right kid, it can cultivate curiosity, independence, collaboration, and a love for self managed learning. For the wrong kid, it can be an unstructured nightmare.
One thing we learned is that Montessori isn't for every child. My oldest did OK but he much prefers traditional schools and is thriving at his middle school (a public magnet). My youngest, on the other hand, loves the self-guided learning and pace. He's more organized and self-motivates better than my oldest which makes a big difference. He reads like crazy and finishes books in a week that would take me a month at least, not sure where that came from but he gets a lot of free time at school when his "works" are finished. Both kids are diagnosed with ADHD and so am I (my poor wife heh).
Another thing, the Montessori we attend is public so it still has to meet district and state testing requirements. That put it in an awkward spot where it could never be pure Montessori because of the district and state mandated testing. It also puts the teachers in an awkward spot because they're rated on testing results which contradicts the Montessori method. My wife got fed up and left last year and no teaches at a traditional public high school.
I live in DFW and the Montessori i'm referring to Mata Elementary. DISD is a notorious hellhole of a district but Mata is hanging in there. It's not perfect by any stretch but they're hanging in there and doing their best with what they have. https://www.dallasisd.org/mata
FWIW, my daughter also struggled with math coming into 2nd grade out of Montessori, but it being second grade math, it wasn't hard for her to catch up.
Also, something to watch out for: Montessori is not a registered trademark, so any school can call itself a Montessori school, without offering a Montessori education.
Your kids will probably be able to socialize with people outside their age range better, but will not be as socially adept with kids their age. I'd recommend some outside activities with strictly people in their age group.
However, as others have said, the individual school can have a huge influence on the quality. We moved interstate a year ago and sadly the new Montessori school doesn’t even have a Montessori teacher in my kids class, so we are leaving.
So make sure you go to an established school where the teachers are Montessori trained and have been in the school a long time. That’s the #1 metric of a Montessori school if you ask me.
There were two notable challenges for me, though not everyone in my class experienced these. Some of it will also be limited if you only have them there through 6th grade.
The first was figuring out how to socially transition from a small private school that effectively functioned like a big family, to a large public school. I didn’t really learn how to meet people being at the same small school for so long, and the culture shock of leaving of leaving Montessori was pretty bad. (Both with the way people my age approached learning and the way the public school system operated, i.e. everything is for a grade nothing else matters).
The second is because of some combination of the curiosity driven learning and the particular sequence of teachers I had, I managed to avoid getting a good foundation in algebra because I didn’t really feel like it. This turned out to be a big problem for me for many years, partially because no one realized so I kept being put in higher math classes, doing well through brute force, and being very frustrated and confused about all of it. I’m now getting an advanced degree in math, so everything worked itself out, but I do think math specifically wants a little more structure at those early steps than what I got.
Overall it was still absolutely worth it for me. Sometimes I wonder who I would be now if my curiosity hadn’t been so strongly reinforced when I was young. Happy to answer any specific questions! Hope this helps.
I do sometimes worry that the freedom might not work well for my kids; maybe they need a bit more guidance. The youngest (7) simply refuses to do his work, and while the oldest (now 13) skipped a grade when he was 7, he failed last year because he was not doing any homework and not turning in his assignments. Stricter guidance might help them both. Or maybe not. It's hard to tell.
My parents apparently did consider Montessori for me, but I've only gone to regular schools, never did my homework, always passed, and in university discovered I had no work discipline at all, so it seems like everybody in our family is going to run into that problem at some point. Maybe it's better to learn it early.
What is slightly different than other experiences here is that the school is a Charter school which poses some challenges but does offer Montessori beyond the normal tuition based model.
As for my daughter, her transition has been fairly smooth. The high school she goes to has more than 10x the students as her old school so is much larger. On the other hand, her grades are good, and she is involved in a number of clubs too.
Montessori is not for everyone but I definitely recommend checking it out.
40 years later, the self-driven learning informs my work, ceeative practice, and ongoing learning. Montessori taught me to look for the next challenge and embrace it.
Dyslexia / dysgraphia / learning differences were not diagnosed in Montessori school, where I excelled at mathematics. When the pressures of prep school ran into the reading writing differences problems ensued.
The bottom line is Montessori taught me to challenge myself and gave me a lifelong love of learning and independent study.
My Montessori school day by grade 6 was a lot of unstructured time, often outdoors, sometimes doing math in the bathroom because that's where it was quiet, very often project based learning with other kids rather than the teacher. Never any "homework" assigned, but often doing school work at home because I wanted to keep working on something.
My prep school was eight periods a day, sitting in desks, learning whatever the day's lesson plan was, getting fixed breaks for lunch and recess, and getting several hours of homework assigned a day.
The two environments were very different. But I adjusted and moved on. The biggest annoyance I had with the prep school was that they controlled my movements so much. In 6th grade, we'd leave the school and go down to the center of town for lunch, getting something at the sub shop or eating our bagged lunch by the town's waterfalls, and returning to school on our own when it was time. In 7th grade, I needed a hall pass to even be out of the classroom during a period, and would definitely get suspended if I left campus during the day.
But from most of the local Montessori schools I toured when I was looking for my son, the freedom we had at my Montessori school in the early 1980's seems to be very much more restricted these days, simply because the larger culture doesn't allow it any longer. The one that actually offered the most freedom for the kids was still the school that I had gone to. But I live too far away from it now for it to have been a real choice.
As it turns out, my son failed spectacularly at his Montessori school because of some learning disabilities he has that they were unable to handle, and he actually is much more happy now in a more traditional school which helped him overcome his disabilities and be successful (not specifically because they are more traditional, but because they are a school well-versed in handling learning disabilities).
That being said, I would not hesitate to put my kids in one, especially over public schools which are a disaster.
Montessori worked really well for me. I have always been 'ahead' and I could explore my own interests. I was never bored in school which is something that changed later on in life. I have very fond memories of that school and my own kids (currently 5 and 3) are in a Montessori school and day care as well.
My son specifically is also doing awesome in Montessori and loves going to school. They have themed shelves with 'tasks' (this is translated, not sure about the common English terminology). Every day they have to do at least one task from the 'language' shelf and one from the 'math' shelf. They also have geography, practical life skills and 'cosmology' (basically anything else) shelves.
Teachers keep track of their skills and accomplished tasks and basically sweep behind if they are lacking in one or more areas by encouraging them to pick up more tasks from those areas.
According to the school on average Montessori kids are more independent, great at critical thinking, more self-confident and tend to pick up leadership roles later in life (I do feel like this applies to me, but I've only had a couple of Montessori years so hard to judge).
I am a big fan.
Is there anything specific you are worried about/interested in?
Look OP, if you think school is about your kids learning you've got it very wrong. Wikipedia and arvix are for learning. School is state subsidized daycare, and social conditioning. Industrial society requires discipline, structure and obedience. Those values are not driven into a child's head in the Montessori, model. Do your kids a favor and get these things drilled into their heads early, before you have a bunch of intellectual bums laying around your house. Don't send your kids to Montessori school.
It worked out well up until my 6th grade (8th grade if you count kindergarten) The higher education part (Montessori Lyceum) never worked out for me as lack of structure and wealth of time freedom killed my effort and work ethos.
The difference between how primary and higher education was structured on a Montessori based education is to far apart of each other.
Primary Montessori education was more about getting the kids curious about the world and make them ask questions and get knowledge that way into the kid. Higher Montessori education was more like standard pumping knowledge that you have to remember for terms and tests.
I was never prepared for that higher education part in my primary education period so I went from bad to worse in my higher education before giving up totally and went to work instead. Later I did catch up when I was grown up.
Still, I am thankful for getting Montessori education as it formed my worldview and kept me curious and inquisitive the rest of my life and even now.
I do wish that in the last 3 years of my primary schooling I had more support for conquering the higher education years.
My oldest daughter attended private Montessori until age 12 when she transitioned to an exurb public Middle school in an extremely high income area.
Transition was easy because the Montessori middle school she was going to was new and hadn't gotten their legs yet, so had a pretty lackluster program. Adding to that the lack of extracurricular and club/team opportunities, and small class sizes, Montessori method starts be become a hindrance to learning the complex social dynamics you need to survive IRL.
My other kids transitioned to US public education at 8 and 10 respectively with no issues
The most difficult transition was for the 8 year old, simply because her personality fits the more loosely structured method of Montessori better, however this faded pretty quickly
Should be noted also that my kids are extremely naturally gifted and generally live in the "AP/Honors" world, so would most likely flourish anywhere. YMMV
It was designed for children after ww2 to reintegrate with their neighborhoods and communities after being shut ins and isolated from other children. It has turned out to have especially meaningful parallels in the past few years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reggio_Emilia_approach
I have heard a lot about Montessori and how it’s relative to the practitioner. One thing that comes up is how reintegrating into society can be harder.
Regarding the Montessori experience, I have fond memories of the 7 or so years I spent there. Although it's impossible to tease out causation, I generally attribute my love of learning and personal autonomy to my years there and very much think it was worth it for me.
Overall I felt it was very restrictive on my education. My day consisted of a few required activities (copy down a few sentences by hand, do 5 addition problems, etc.) followed by doing whatever I wanted. My favorite one was putting together a cube out of these colored blocks, but there’s only so many times you can put that together. The rest of the day was basically spent in boredom as I’d exhausted all the activities that interested me. I spent a fair amount of time reading.
The restrictive part however was the complete lack of preparation on the part of the teachers to teach anything. I remember after doing addition for a while, I asked my teacher to teach me how to multiply. She said “no, that’s for third graders” and left. I basically pieced together that “two times three” meant 2+2+2 just from the way it sounded in English. What a way to shut down a child’s education.
I’m sure I had an abnormally bad experience, and my sample size isn’t enough to discredit the Montessori methodology as a whole. However, I was much happier and felt I learned a lot more from public school. My conclusion is thus that the quality of teachers is vastly more important than the methodology. If you have well-funded public schools in your area, I would definitely suggest them over a poorer private Montessori school.
One thing that may also be a factor is any learning differences in the child. Montessori teaching is rigid in its own way and not the best for children with dyslexia/dysgraphia (though neither are standard public school curricula). Although early Montessori math is friendlier for dyscalculia with all the use of physical objects. Depending on the school and individual guides, things like ADHD, autism may also lead to issues with the school. Thought that could be said of any private school.
The biggest thing we saw with people pulling their children out of Montessori schools were fears about academic progress and measuring their children against their neighbors' kids in public school. That's on the parent though: some needed constant feedback and validation via grades to feel like their kids were competitive with public schools.
- Self paced learning and choosing how to spend your time
- Need to collaborate with your peers on scarce resources (everyone can't read the same book / solve the same challenge at the same time)
- Small classes, no one could get away with anything/bullying
- Responsibility for completing the weekly plan yourself and being rewarded for hard work ("the diligence light is well lit" sticker you got when sharing your weekly progress - sry poorly translated Swedish"
I put my kid in a Montessori Preschool. The school was one giant 25-kid classroom with about 5 teachers. He absolutely loved a specific and was learning from her. He was starting to learn to read at the age of 4, super interested in everything she brought him. Then his favorite teacher left the school and it was never the same thing again. Even though he already knew the others, they could never actually get him interested in reading again or simply learning. It seems to me he didn't like the "focus time" (I forgot the name they use!) and doing activities all by himself. School as mostly boring to him, I ever wonder what the heck he was doing there all that time, 99% of the stories he shared with us happened during the little outside play time they had.
Then we put him in Public School for Kindergarten and he absolutely loved it. He loved doing the same activity as everybody else, he loved the teacher, he loved the more energetic environment. He immediately got interested in learning again.
So my conclusion is that it has much more to do with the teacher and the environment than with the method. Choose well, and trust your feelings when you see and talk to the teachers.
Monstessori is definitely not for everyone, I really enjoyed my time there (not counting the traumatic experiences caused by classmates). I definitely feel like the teachers there can give you a more personalized way of learning which just isn't possible on standard schools. The national curriculum did not challenge me enough and had me really struggling to do any work, eventually my teachers allowed me more time on the computer if I did my work and that worked really well for me.
For transitioning to high school, at first I quite enjoyed it as it was all new but after a while I just lost all motivation. Every meeting with my parents and the school basically came down to "We really think monkeyguy can do better, but he just doesn't seem interested". It sucked, I barely did anything and I barely passed each year. Eventually I graduated and the same thing happened with college/uni. Work life has been great however.
I'm not going to recommend anything however, I do not know your children as well as you do.
Montessori education allows children freedom to explore and follow their own interests, and this lack of structure can be problematic. I was a bright kid and many things came easily to me, so when I encountered something that didn't, I would get frustrated and quit.
Unfortunately there are many topics that require pure grinding to master: multiplication tables, musical scales, foreign vocabulary[0], etc. Not only was there nobody to force me to focus on repeating difficult, unpleasant work, I also failed to learn the meta-skill of how to make myself stick at doing things I suck at.
This eventually came to hamstring me later in my education, and even in my adult career I struggle to make myself do necessary yak-shaving.[1]
[0] maybe less so for young children
[1] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/3880...
The gap did provide a bit of a buffer, but I nonetheless did not care for the transition. While the systems were quite different, I believe it was more the difference in the teacher quality that had the largest impact. I was fortunate to go to a small, exceptional Montessori school before such things became ridiculously expensive, while the public school, although it had a few very good teachers, also had some very marginal ones (basically, tenured and terrible).
If the quality of teaching is similar, then I expect the transition would have been much easier. As others have noted, shop around since the teaching quality, rather than the teaching structure, is ultimately what was the starkest change for me.
In retrospect, I am really glad I moved a bit earlier, because I think going straight from Montessori to 7th grade (junior high there) would have been a big jump. Moving over while still in elementary school eased that. But that was me and my situation.
I went through something similar through the end of high school. I did, however, go through public school for elementary.
My experiences mirror a lot of what others on here have already written. The transition to back to traditional education (university) wasn't an issue.
If you are already motivated, going from a low to moderately more rigorous style of learning is easy.
The issue is going in the other direction, which is why so many first year university students fail.
The montessori was probably a great fit for me because I couldn't sit in a desk all day after moving to regular school and got in a little trouble for being unable to do so until I was about 16.
The oldest one loved it and thrived in Montessori and stayed in it until we started a Charter school to avoid the local Middle School.
The second one HATED Montessori and we had to move him out to the local elementary school.
In the end it came down to personality. The second kid had a personality that just wouldn't work in a Montessori environment. He would do what he wanted to when he wanted to and would refuse to be redirected in any way, shape or form. Same school, mostly the same teachers, but totally opposite outcomes.
I loved it!!
Montessori is a style of learning, the implementation will vary according to the school though.
I went to a Montesorri school from 1st through 4th grade. I enjoyed the atmosphere. In recent years I've read about Montessori and found that my Montessori experience was different, but much the same wrt a gentle focus on practical individual learning.
Non Montessori school was a process of checking boxes and actual thinking inbetween, while Montessori was a cycle of thinking through problems for yourself, sometimes as a group.
One thing I didn't appreciate until later school years is that Montessori blends different ages and skill levels together. I neither felt the need to keep up nor to excel, just to figure stuff out. For example, I remember a a classmate writing an essay using movable letters on a mat, but he didn't space them out so it was hard to read. I asked why he was doing it like that and the teacher responded that he had chosen to do it that way, I felt it was wrong, but instead of letting me get on a high horse, the teacher drew my attention to what I was already on my way to do. He continued to write without spaces, and I continued to think someone should correct him. Lo and behold, he learned to use spaces, all without someone, teacher nor child, scolding him, with words or with red marks. That's hard to do in typical bureaucratized classroom.
If I were pressed to find fault in Montessori itself, I'd say, it cannot succeed at all without good teachers/emotion/energy conductors, while a common classroom can get ok enough outcomes with an authority figure and good textbooks.
Most of the other students had done kindergarten at my new school and already knew each other. I did eventually make friends, but I always felt like a bit of an outsider since I didn't have that shared kindergarten experience with my peers.
I imagine this would only get worse the longer a child stays out of the conventional schooling system.
What I've enjoyed is watching how lessons are very "touch" oriented. Seems every lesson has a visual or touch oriented wood tool.
The students are dividing 6 digit numbers in 2nd/3rd (!).
There were several young people who I later transferred in HS back into their district and remembered.
Lots of little learning puzzles and nap time. LOTS Of stories. In fact I would say the curriculum, and this is a long time ago, was primarily fables besides what was self-directed and puzzles. The teachers were mostly kind.
You probably need both to be well adapted because the public system teaches you to defend yourself, which us necessary IRL. Montessori teaches you collaboration and thinking outside of zero sum mindset.
She largely outperformed all her peers later in life.
hippie school teaches you how to love the world, state school teaches you how to live in it.
I need to find out where it was (and how old I was - I would guess 5 or 6), but the situation is that I was not ready (or perhaps not the right type of kid) for Montessori.
I was painfully shy, and I'd avoid attention.
The teachers (there were 2 I believe) must have been happy to ignore me. How else do you spend an entire year not paying attention to a student? Perhaps they were overworked.
I'd spend a lot of time in the bathroom, or ... I'm not even sure what. Playing with something, but generally not learning.
The strong theme of these comments here are how Montessori really allowed some to thrive, but I cannot imagine that - it was very much not my experience. Perhaps that was me, or perhaps it was that particular school. Likely both.
I have a distinct memory of another student (a friend) learning the alphabet. A teacher was spending time with him, letting him draw the letters out. For whatever reason, I wanted to be included in that. Even at that young age, I suspect I knew that something was off. I wanted that attention as well.
I expressed interest in doing what my friend was doing (I'm not sure what - writing out the alphabet perhaps), but was told no. I don't remember why, this was some 30+ years ago now - but I recall that rejection.
I eventually went to public school, but was very nearly held back. I didn't know anything!
My mother interceded and I was allowed to stay in that grade (which is good, I'm still on the older side for my grade - holding me back could have been even more awkward).
She helped me learn what I needed to know at home - I imagine it was quite the effort.
I still wonder why I was put in that position to begin with! You think they would know that I wasn't learning anything, but I'll bet it was easy to hide.
Kids born in the 80's and 90's tended to have parents who were very hands-off it seems (certainly my case, and anecdotally, that seems to the trend of those times). I've asked what was going on before, but answering specifics from decisions from 30 years ago is a tough question for a parent in their 70's now. They were probably struggling with money at the time and had their own worries.
I'm not sure I'll send my kids to Montessori, although I suspect they would thrive where I did not. Parents now a days (me!) are much more involved in their kids lives (for better or worse) and I imagine between internet reviews and us being top of it, my own issue wouldn't be repeated for my kids.
Rishi Valley's teachning style is, honestly, what I wish my education had been. I remember being a kid and asking my teacher for "more", questions about what happens _beyond_ what we had just learned, and them saying "don't worry about it, you'll learn next year". Rishi Valley's approach is "why don't you come later and I'll show you? is anyone else interested?". They really try to emphasize learning for the sake of learning, and kids can choose from multiple subjects.
The teachers are often PhDs who have decided that they care a lot about education. Since it's a not for profit school, they're not paid a lot, but they live on campus, and get to interact with kids all day everyday. Most of the money the school gets is put back into rural education.
Now, the transition back to the "standard" system when the kids have to go to college is not smooth. Most of the ones I've talked to mention that they were extremely overwhelmed with the "rat-race" and the fact that everyone was so competitive, where they had been focusing on learning for the sake of learning. Everyone I've met from this school is very good at critical-thinking, and they don't accept a conclusion just because "someone said so", they will fact-check, do their own research, debate, ... Which I think should be the goal of education.
My anecdotal experience is that they overperform their non-weird-school peers though. But is that due to the teaching itself? Or is it maybe because the kind of parents who would put their kids in this school already did some sort of ground-work? I'm not sure!