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Summary: Welcoming the Unwelcome
Review: This book is a collection of stories, insight and practical advice from working with twelve children during the thirty-year teaching career of Donna Bryant Goertz. Donna is a skillful, observant practitioner who provides us with a glimpse of her classroom that characterizes what she considers the absence of "obnoxious", "different", "problem", or "difficult" children. She provides us with the perspective that it is possible to welcome and include every child into a classroom and treat them with respect, dignity and love. The book replaces old habits and paradigms with better tools that build community rather than compliance. It is a MUST read.
Rating:
Summary: A School Where Everyone Fits
Review: Two things about this profound book grabbed me and wouldn't let go. For starters, it absolutely train wrecked the stereotype I have long carried of Montessori schools as the exclusive domain of the "well-adjusted" children of the bourgeoisie. Until now, in other words, an inclusive Montessori school was an oxymoron in my lexicon. But, as Donna Bryant Goertz makes so poignantly clear in every one of the nearly two dozen stories about the, as she calls them, "eccentric" children who have enlivened her classroom in the Austin Montessori school over the past thirty-three years, a good teacher will make every effort to include even the most difficult child. The group dynamic of the classroom must not allow the failure of any child to thrive, she so rightly insists.Goertz elevates the act of reaching the previously unreachable student to an art form. Consider the case of Argenta, who as her teacher put it, "used pee, and poop and food to control her parents and her teachers." Goertz, like her guiding light Maria Montessori before her, always proceeds on the belief that all children, if greeted with trust and patience -- and without judgment or blame -- will eventually present their own solutions to their inner dilemmas. So the first time Argenta peed all over herself, her chair and the floor, Goertz instantly recognized that the answer to her new student's obstreperousness lay in all that wetness. Rather than scold Argenta, Goertz kindly instructed her to change into dry clothes and clean up the mess. Then Goertz enlisted the help of several classmates to help Argenta with was to become a daily two-hour ritual for the next several months. Together they got out all of the various cleaning apparatuses that Montessori specified must be part of every classroom, rolled up their sleeves and got to work. The ritual produced healing on many levels. It eliminated the charge that had always accompanied Argenta's lack of bladder control and so she stopped wetting herself. It created a bridge between the other children and this newcomer who was so wildly different from them. And it even helped strengthen the previously immature muscles in Argenta's hands and arms. By mid-year Argenta was a fully integrated member of the class, reading and writing and crocheting right along with everyone else. Then there was Herzog, a little rascal with scant ability to focus and a grand penchant for making messes. In a moment reminiscent of the time A.S. Neill joined in with the boy who was breaking the windows in Neill's beloved greenhouse, one day Goertz -- Donna to her students -- interrupted a very surprised Herzog just as he was about to launch one of his daily guerrilla messing sorties. Instead she invited him to help her unravel all of her special balls of colored yarn into one mad tangle. When all the yarn was undone, they stepped back together to admire their exquisite mess. Then, as Goertz did with Argenta, she recruited a bevy of volunteers to help restore order to the yarn. Herzog only required three or four such "treatments" before he moved on to a fascination with spiders. Soon he became the self-appointed caretaker of the classroom arachnids, earning the anxious newcomer much needed status among his peers. By year's end, Herzog was an accepted member of the group. Goertz furthered endeared me to her work when was careful to point out that it is not only important to include children who are markedly different for their sake, but also for their value to the class as a whole. These children, she writes, are the barometer for how well the classroom is meeting the needs of all the children because they react overtly is ways that the others won't, and in ways that cannot be ignored. Which leads to the second and most important reason I loved this book: the author's steadfast refusal to permit the labeling or medicating of any child, and her eloquent castigation of the system that relies so heavily on such tactics of exclusion and control. After reading Goertz's stories, only the most closed-minded would fail to recognize that there are other, far better ways to heal children with significant developmental roadblocks. This is a book filled with deep wisdom about children. Don't miss it.
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