Here is the full text of the graduation speech I gave at Montessori Northwest. I took my 3 hour oral exams on Thursday and got the call from Elise that I had passed about an hour later. I was drained and fell asleep, then immediately started working on the speech to read at graduation Friday afternoon. It was the first time I have shared something so personal in front of so many people and it was powerful to see people's reactions to it; lots of laughter and tears as well. I've resisted the urge to proofread it and edit... This is what I read from that afternoon, typos and all.
This year
has been a blur of submissions, corrections, charts and exams and its been hard
for any of us to absorb what’s been happening to us and what we have
accomplished. Hopefully today and this
weekend we can truly reflect and take time to be proud of ourselves.
For each of
us this year has been a struggle, an adventure, and an inspiration. I thought after my exam about the different
fears we have each overcome this year. Some people have faced adult fears of singing
or dancing in front of others, or of telling stories, or of drawing little
doodles of leaves and flowers. And some
have faced fears that chased them from childhood of fractions or letters being
used in math, or typing page after page of notes then proofreading,
spellchecking and printing. We’ve even
struggled with childhood social anxieties about choosing a spot to sit at lunch
or a partner to work with. At first our
program felt like a reality tv show where we were locked in a room with a lot
of weird stuff and 22 strangers for a couple hours while an audience of Elise,
Jenn and John got to sit and watch what happened. Like Montessori kids we could experiment with
social interactions and group dynamics as we built a structure to study and
master lessons; we learned how to organize work time within groups and balance
work with socializing. Its rare for
either a child or adult in our culture to have a chance to get this close to
people from all over the whole world and engage with them every day. I’m grateful for all I learned together with
all of you and also what I learned from each of you. By the end of the year you could look around
during our study time and feel the energy in the room of adults deeply engaged
in what they were passionate about- everyone doing different work but in a zone
of intense concentration. Time would
seem to stand still as we all got deep into our work then looked up in
disbelief to realize hours had gone by without our attention wavering.
We’ve all
faced adversities this year and I would like to share a little bit about mine
in hopes that it resonates with some of you in this room. For me one of the struggles this year has
been with my “carelessness” that has haunted me since my 2nd grade teacher
first brought it up. My struggle in
school was always losing every important document sent home, not knowing when a
due date was, or not having systems to prioritize and get simple, stupid,
little things done. And people told me
to just be organized and stop being forgetful or absentminded, but my schooling
never taught me how to do this.
As an adult
I have struggled with related issues: with losing credit cards or important
documents, or forgetting adult due dates, like not paying a parking ticket
before it doubles for late payment, or registering on time for Loyola classes. As a first year public school teacher last
year these problems were one of many reasons I wasn’t able to be successful.
Children’s
work and scraps stacked up around me and no one had any idea where the supplies
they needed were. Being organized for
myself is more than I ever could accomplish so setting 25 little bodies up to
be organized just wasn’t going to happen.
In the
beginning of the course the same struggles threatened to drown me- just keeping
track of what I needed to do for each assignment and printing then reprinting
pages while organizing my thoughts was overwhelming. Then corrections started piling up. I would look at a mass of papers and things I
needed to do and not even begin to know where I could start dealing with them. I was on the verge of shutting down.
I read an
article recently that talked about procrastination as the dark playground. When you’re in the dark playground you are having
fun or maybe even just wasting time on the internet, but you feel dread because
you know you’re supposed to be doing something else. Then slowly you get further and further
behind, avoiding what you really need to do, and the dread starts to creep up
on you, but you don’t even know how to get started so you ignore it and stay in
a darker and darker playground. I felt
like this often last year in public school -so overwhelmed by everything I had
to do that I couldn’t even face it or think about it. I never learned how to be an adult who
organizes his own time and gets the things he needs to get done. I was always able to get by in school based
on understanding math and writing the way it was taught, I was lucky in that
regard. But I never truly learned
organizational systems to thrive- in school I was told exactly what to do but
as a teacher I had no idea how to manage my time and organize to teach without
someone telling me what to do. And too
many adults today don’t know how to think for themselves and are even comforted
by controlling bosses ordering them around because its all they know.
A couple
months into the year I started to slip into this same place and get behind in
my work. I had so much to do that I often struggled to even face it or get
started. Then somehow with the support
of Elise, Jen, John and Gloria I came back and completed the work load. A big reason for this is training forcing us
to focus so
intensely on what we are working on. Like the children, we have that work period
and a choice of a certain number of things to think deeply about and engage
with. Our brains are so cluttered by
this society we live in and everything that drains our attention that almost
everyone I know will sometimes waste an entire night clicking through different
links on a computer screen and afterwards be unable to say what they actually
did or accomplished; we race from one distraction to another without truly
being present. Being at MNW taught me to
truly focus on one thing with all of my being.
A critical point for me in this year was when I started pausing before I
went to work to think about what materials I would need for what I was
doing. I took a minute to be aware of where
I needed to be, what I needed to do and what I would need to hold in my mind
and think about while I acted. This
opened up a space for me to breathe, relax and shut out everything but what I
needed to do to accomplish one task at a time.
I was then able to use the same focus towards organizational and
logistical tasks in life. I started
enjoying facing the stacks of papers as I would print a submission. I would relax, breathe, then lay out the papers
and binders I needed on my floor, stretch out and get to work on exactly what I
needed to do.
The class
is so fast paced that procrastination was impossible. With the support of staff, my classmates and
the focus I learned in the prepared environment I was able to learn to charge
ahead on my work. Rather than making
excuses to put things off I learned to do whatever I could today to make
tomorrow easier. I know I have learned
some kind of adult version of freedom and responsibility because after coming
home from exams I immediately started organizing and packing my things to
leave. Last year I would have said I had
accomplished enough for the day and started partying right after the test was
over. Now I know that packing Thursday
would allow me to enjoy the weekend with all of you.
I decided to take this course based
on instinct after almost no experience with Montessori. A year ago I was down in a deep hole. People were telling me I was a natural
teacher but I couldn’t put the pieces together to succeed as a teacher and had
no idea what else I could do with my life if I couldn’t be successful in this. I can honestly say that this course has saved
my life, and taught me that I really can be a teacher in a system I believe in,
and not only that but a successful, well adapted adult. I don’t expect the coming years to be easy,
but like all of you I know I can succeed after facing 3 hours of intense
questioning from revered experts within a field.
And so the
last year for me has been a struggle to learn to be an adult and come back from
a low point in my life. Yet many of you
learned to be adults and face your toughest adversities years ago and you have
still grown as much as I through this course.
One of my classmates dropped out of school as a teenager after being
told she was worthless by the traditional education system. And yet somehow after that she managed to run
her own business, start an incredible family and find the fountain of youth in
a Canadian garden of eden. Yet as Ginny
told us early in the course, we all have come here because for whatever reason
we have decided we want to be the followers and the younger children in a
mixed-age class learning from those who know something we don’t. Even after all that she has accomplished she
has come back to face childhood fears of fractions, and Montessori has showed
that no matter what some idiot principal told her as a child she actually is as
good at math as anyone I’ve ever met when it is presented in a logical
sequence. I hope you know that your life
story is a deep inspiration to me and many of and I can’t wait to see what else
you accomplish.
Like most
Montessorians early in the year I struggled with one of the big questions: is
Montessori a cult? What I eventually
decided and have shared with some of you was that in our society we label
anything people care deeply about and invest deeply in a cult. We waste away our precious life energy as
divided, fleeting and shallow attention is the norm in our society. Nothing has value or meaning as everything is
made of plastic and to break right away to keep us buying and wasting. Cynicism replaces passion and those with a
unique passion are called obsessed rather than devoted by society, although
less so in Portland than elsewhere. In
Montessori we value objects and care for them, and we value tradition and doing
things the way they have been done by those before us. Not only that, but we have spent a year truly
dedicated to one thing, completely focused on learning to give these lessons we
have shut everything else out. We have
had faith to believe that what we are doing is so valuable that it is worth whatever
sacrifices it entails. Although I can
never truly understand it, I feel like this year I have gained some
appreciation of what Sister has done by giving her life over completely to
faith in what she believes, knowing that whatever she sacrifices is worth it to
choose dedication to her beliefs.
And through
this dedication we have had a chance to be part of a legacy, to learn from
someone who learned from a student of Maria Montessori herself. When we sit and tell the story of the
universe to children we will be passing on something that has survived so many
trends and still stayed relevant for a century after it was written.
And so now
we will drift out to distant corners of the world like dandelion seeds in the
wind. And yet wherever we land we will
carry the legacy of Elise’s training and Margaret Stephenson's and Mario and
Maria’s before. We will be true to the
training and yet use our unique gifts of reasoning to adapt it to the
environment we are in and make it our own.
I know the adventures in Montessori are just beginning for all of us and
I can’t wait to hear all of your stories of how this works in the classroom. Thank you all for being part of my journeys. Some of us are going straight into other
stressful situations like at Loyola.
Some will even go right back to work at this very training center within
a couple weeks, can you imagine?? Yet
whatever stress and challenges await, I hope we each take some time in the next
few days to think about what these means and be proud of ourselves. After all we’ve been through we can
accomplish whatever we dream. Thank you
all.
The dark playground- GREAT ARTICLE!!
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