Looking Forward

The summer teacher training sessions ended Friday and already I find that I am looking forward to the coming school year. It will be good to see all the children again, and we are looking forward to many exciting improvements.

Our familiar staff will be returning in with some exciting additions. Valerie will be a new teacher in the early childhood classroom. She has years of experience to bring to the class. Her easy style will be comforting to the students. Plus, she hails from France, so she will be able to greatly enhance our French program.

Another face “new” to the early childhood classroom will be Allison. After a year at home in Chattanooga, Allison is returning to us. She’ll be working full time in the early childhood classroom since she started taking her Montessori training this summer. Our older EC students will be delighted to see her again.

We also welcome Georgi Schmitt. Georgi will be teaching music as a special class. Starting in late August, she will come on Wednesdays to teach using the Orff approach. Our new Orff music instruments should have arrived by then. Georgi will also be giving recorder lessons to the older elementary students. It is going to be a very musical school.

Our elementary class is “expanding” into the multipurpose room, too. Art, music and experimental science materials will move into that room, allowing more materials to stay out for continued student use. Britton is also moving into the elementary to help keep that space supervised. This will allow the library area to be supervised, too, giving students more support for continued research of their many projects.

Carl and I have this last week to finish getting the physical space ready for the new family orientations that start Monday, August 6. Our teachers return on August 8. It will be good to see all of them, too.

I’m really looking forward to this next year.

Over the summers Carl always has a long list of projects to work on while I am teaching the adults who are here to become Montessori guides in their own classrooms. One of his yearly projects is waxing all the floors. Most of the school is finished, except for the elementary classroom that I’m using right now.

This year he has been working on another really big project. He has been building a new patio area directly outside the classrooms at the back of the school. I envision being able to use this area during nice weather as an adjunct to the regular rooms. He found a nice concrete latching tile system on sale. Then the long arduous process of getting the area graded and leveled began. His time to work has been limited by having to baby-sit our granddaughter while her father attends training, but the new patio is really beginning to take shape.

He is not going to lay the tiles until after another big project is finished next week. We are having an air conditioning system installed. Now during those hot months the rooms will remain cool without the roar of window units! I can hardly wait.

It is always so much fun to see students away from school. It is hard to know how they are going to react to seeing their teachers out of context.

This evening we had gone out to eat with a group of friends. My granddaughter and son-in-law were along and there was another little girl in the group. The youngest generation (it was a truly muli-generational group of friends) got a little restless after the meal and I took the two girls outside to walk around a bit. One had on a new pair of shoes (clogs) that she had not quite mastered, so she and I were lagging behind my granddaughter.

And just as we were passing a Kinko’s one of my students emerged with her mother. I could tell she was excited to see me. The wide smile and sparkling eyes said it all. But there I was with two children who she did not know from school! How strange that must have seemed to her. I belonged to her and HER class, not these strangers! We talked a bit, or rather I talked and she smiled. Then she went on to the bookstore with her mom.

When I got back to the restaurant Carl was disappointed that he had not seen her, too. We miss “our” kids in the summer. Another training session starts in the morning. After I finish with that I can once again turn my attention to preparing for school to start.

Then I won’t be out of context anymore.