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Following the lead of DPS, Bergamo Academy will also be closed due to snow on Friday, February 3, 2012.

From a Virginia Tech doctoral thesis on Maria Montessori's 1913 visit to the U.S.:

Arriving on December 3, 1913, Montessori's visit was primarily a series of lectures focused around her educational ideas and methods recently published and translated into English in The Montessori Method. During the 1913 visit she spoke before educators, parents, educational enthusiasts and journalists. She spoke at the Masonic Temple in Washington D.C. anda t Carnegie Hall twice;once she was introduced by John Dewey. During this visit she also spoke to educators in Philadelphia where she met Helen Keller. Even though this was Dr. Montessori's first visit to the United States, her work preceded her. Some, like Jane Addams, had seen Montessori's work in Europe and came to hear of recent advancements in her ideas. Writers, like Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and educators, like William Heard Kilpatrick, had added to the public opinion of her through their written reactions to her ideas. Others like Anne George, who was the first and only trained Montessori teacher in the United States, had been working on Montessori's behalf for several years. Montessori attracted interested people from diverse backgrounds and for diverse reasons.

Fifth grade Montessori student in Kansas City co-authors molecular chemistry paper in the journal Computational and Theoretical Chemistry.

A blog entry I Hate School posted to mariamontessori.com, run by the Montessori Administrators Association, contrasts the attitudes of students in conventional versus Montessori schools.

A popular news story on the web this week is about a scientific study on tantrums, such as NPR's What's Behind A Temper Tantrum? Scientists Deconstruct The Screams. However, all the scientists really did was quantitatively measure the screams and sobs and didn't really uncover what was "behind" the tantrums as the NPR title suggests.

In contrast, Dr. Maria Montessori made, a century ago, several qualitative scientific observations about tantrums:

1. Young children have a "sense of order" such as spatial order, and when this order is violated, such as if a commonly-used object has been moved to an unusual location, then a tantrum may ensue. This is why a Montessori Primary classroom has shelves with materials that remain in the same place every day -- placement of materials on shelves is not arbitrary.
2. Children have "sensitive periods" of development, where a child is open to developing particular capacities such as walking, language, sensory skills, fine motor skills, etc. During these sensitive periods, the child craves to develop these skills and abilities, and if that need is not met, it can result in tantrums.
3. Children crave to imitate adults, to "do it themselves", and when denied tantrums result.

For these reasons, three-year-olds starting out in a Montessori Primary classroom are given the "exercises of practical life". These exercises are not as captivating to the adult eye as some of the unique math materials that Dr. Montessori also created, but they very cleverly address each of the three points above:

1. The practical life exercises are kept in the same place on the same shelves every day.
2. The practical life exercises develop the fine and gross motor skills, which is a sensitive period for that age.
3. The practical life exercises provide the children dignity to perform the same work that adults do.

The third year of the three-year (ages 3-6) Primary program is the most important. It's where the advanced math and language materials get used -- made possible by the first two years of foundational work. It's also where the children become leaders of the classroom.

AMS has released a free video excerpt showing this, and it's admittedly better than the AMI one which is now a quarter-century old and available only as a VHS transfer to DVD. (So e.g. you'll notice that the moveable alphabet is print rather than cursive as it would be at an AMI school).

Boston Magazine has conversational article Welcome to the Age of Overparenting. Below is a short excerpt that illustrates the Montessori principle (or, more accurately, the opposite of that principle, since it wasn't followed in this anecdote) of enabling children to make their own decisions, to learn consequences, and to have the self-confidence to make future ventures and decisions:

...a story about how, years ago, his 11-year-old daughter and several of her friends were planning an overnight campout with some younger neighborhood kids in his backyard. Before the big night, the parents of the younger kids began scouring his lawn for nails and shards of glass. "It just seemed like, Whoa, what is going on with this anxiety?" Weissbourd recalls. The problem wasn’t just the parental anxiety itself — it was how it was actually reshaping the experience for those kids: "I felt like these 10- and 11-year-old girls were so conscientious and these parents came and undermined them."

From mariamontessori.com, a letter as if written from a Montessori student to the student's parent: Owners Manual for a Montessori Child.

Yesterday the Washington Post blogged When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids (emphasis added):

A longtime friend on the school board of one of the largest school systems in America did something that few public servants are willing to do. He took versions of his state's high-stakes standardized math and reading tests for 10th graders, and said he'd make his scores public.

By any reasonable measure, my friend is a success. His now-grown kids are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of town. Paid-for condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots of frequent flyer miles. Enough time of his own to give serious attention to his school board responsibilities. The margins of his electoral wins and his good relationships with administrators and teachers testify to his openness to dialogue and willingness to listen.

[...]

"I won’t beat around the bush," he wrote in an email. "The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a 'D', and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.

He continued, "It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.

"I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities.

"I have a wide circle of friends in various professions. Since taking the test, I’ve detailed its contents as best I can to many of them, particularly the math section, which does more than its share of shoving students in our system out of school and on to the street. Not a single one of them said that the math I described was necessary in their profession.

"It might be argued that I've been out of school too long, that if I'd actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn't that miss the point? A test that can determine a student's future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can't see how that could possibly be true of the test I took."

Here's the clincher in what he wrote:

"If I'd been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I'd have been told I wasn't 'college material,' would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had.

"It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student's entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning. Who decided the kind of questions and their level of difficulty? Using what criteria? To whom did they have to defend their decisions? As subject-matter specialists, how qualified were they to make general judgments about the needs of this state’s children in a future they can’t possibly predict? Who set the pass-fail 'cut score'? How?"

In Montessori there is no testing at all -- just teacher evaluations. And since Bergamo Academy is a private school, unlike public and even charter schools, it is not required to give CSAP tests (and even some private Montessori schools voluntarily give standardized tests).

Although the link to Dr. Adele Diamond's full Dec. 1, 2011 lecture was posted here just two days ago (Neuroscientist: Why Montessori Can Help Executive Function Skills), the Montessori Administrators Association has conveniently posted just a clip where she compares Dr. Montessori's "normalization" to modern science's "executive function":