1. Love: the Passageway to Normalization:
Learning to See the Child That Is Not Yet There By
Mary Ellen Maunz, M.Ed.

2. Maria Montessori on learning to see the child who is not yet there
“An ordinary teacher cannot be transformed into a Montessori teacher, but must be created anew, having rid herself of pedagogical prejudices. “The first step is self-preparation of the imagination, for the Montessori teacher has to visualize a child who is not yet there.”

3. Waiting for concentration
“She must have faith in the child who will reveal himself through work. “The different types of deviated children do not shake the faith of this teacher, who sees a different type of child in the spiritual field, and looks confidently for this self to show when attracted by work that interests. “She waits for the children to show signs of concentration.” Maria Montessori

4. The prepared environment includes YOU

5. How do we learn to see the child who is not yet there?
How do we develop the self-mastery to not let the children push our buttons?
Do you react to a child who is whining?
Do you react to a child who wants your attention every minute of every day?
Do you react to the child who takes a resentful, challenging tone every time she speaks to you?
Does a child make you inexplicably angry?
This is a question worthy of our consideration. Becoming a teacher, when you are the one person in the classroom responsible for the well being of the children as well as their education, is a very big task. While someone in an office can get frustrated with his or her work and go take a walk, when you are with children, you cannot leave. Whatever you bring to the class is what the children get. Yes, of course we have the prepared environment, but if the teacher is not welcoming, even-keeled and kind, the child may not ever discover all that is within the classroom. The teacher is the bridge to the environment.

6. The science and the art of Montessori
Are we clear on the progression through the areas or avenues of our lessons? Are we observing closely enough to determine what a child may be ready for and when a child needs the next step, or something entirely different?

7. Normalization through work
“It is a question of rapid, and at times, almost instantaneous change that comes always from the same source. I would not be able to cite a single example of a conversion taking place without an interesting task that concentrates the child’s activities.” E. M. Standing

8. “What is to be particularly noted in these child conversions is a psychic cure, a return to what is normal. Actually, the normal child is one who is:
precociously intelligent
who has learned to overcome himself and to live in peace
and who prefers a disciplined task to futile idleness.”
Maria Montessori

9. Transforming power of love
The ability to see beauty in children and to recognize the inner teacher
To hold the vision in our mind’s eye of the children finding work, even when they show us nothing but naughtiness

10. This transforming power is a love that wells up within the heart that makes up the difference between the shortcomings of the children and what they can become. The gap, however large or small, between present imperfections and future attainment is always filled in by the love and the imagination of your heart.

11. Imagination
Remember Montessori’s words: “The first step is self-preparation of the imagination, for the Montessori teacher has to visualize a child who is not yet there.”
Imagination helps us see that child before he sees for himself what he can do.

12. The love of your heart can be the bridge to take the child from where he is now to where he can be

13. Prepared environment + YOU = normalized child

14. Using our imagination and our vision to evoke the child who is not yet there is a powerful idea. Several wonderful films capture what it means to be the bridge to the child who is not yet there.

15. The Miracle Worker

16. To Be and To Have

17. The Marva Collins Story
Chicago public school teacher
Disillusioned with system
Founded Westside Preparatory Academy
Turned around the lives of thousands of children
She was not trained in Montessori, but she saw and brought out the child who was not yet there
President Reagan invited her to be Secretary of Education

18. Stand and Deliver

19. Like Stars on Earth

20. Montessori on this love: from The Child in the Family
“A teacher must be consecrated to bettering humanity. She must be like the vestal who kept the sacred fire that other had lighted pure and free from contamination. “The teacher must be dedicated to the fire of the inner life in all its purity. If this flame is neglected, it will be extinguished, never to be lighted again.”

21. Lest we forget
“It is true that these little children have demonstrated to us the interior laws of the formation of man, laws which have given rise to a method of education which has spread all over the earth. “Unfortunately the stupendous importance of this revelation has become overlaid and confused by a disproportionate emphasis on the new method, which came out of it.

22. “For it was not the method which produced the marvelous manifestations so much as the manifestations which produced the method—or, more accurately, sketched out its general outlines.”

23. From The Formation of Man
“I may affirm that the revelations of the child are not at all difficult to obtain, the real difficulty lies in the adult’s old prejudices concerning him…. “To help life: this is the first and fundamental principle.”

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