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ABOUT ARBOR2005 Student Graduation Speech
THE LAST EDITION OF MIDDLE SCHOOL NOTES
by Tarun Narasimhan
I’ve been in Arbor since the beginning. That’s right: I’ve been going to this institution for eleven years. Some might say it’s interminable, but I handled it pretty well. Anyway, my point is that I’m pretty qualified to talk about this school. And so let me give you an idea of what it’s like to have been here from the beginning.
Me, I went to primary in a trailer. Other kids went to Lavista one or two in the main building, or went to the Emory campus. But I was stuck in the big metal box. In this paradise for preschoolers, we learned such essential skills as shoe-tying, polishing, and my personal favorite: naptime. But we weren’t in dreamland all day back then, as I rediscovered when I hung out at Emory for a week on my internship. First thing in the morning, the kids would walk in and pick and do jobs. Here’s the strange part: while we middle school students must have all four teachers pleading with us for us to move an inch towards a math textbook, these kindergarteners approached their work with (dare I say it?) eagerness. I believe that it says something (and something very good) about the Montessori Method that these four-to-six-year-olds have so much self-motivation. Because this is fast becoming a foreign concept in the middle school, I have to feel some sense of awe. In my internship (and I also remember this from my own carefree days), students more or less worked by themselves. An Arbor educator informed me that primary is a time for inward exploration, which explains why the place always sounded about as noisy as a library.
At long last, I got to leave my corrugated classroom and move to Lower Elementary. In there, we were pretty much left to do our own work. In these fun times, assignments were few and far between if they ever appeared, and it was as good a time as any to start making friends that would be with you for the entire time you’re at Arbor. Indeed, when I interviewed an elementary educator, I discovered that was one of the “big picture” goals of Lower Elementary: to start exploring socially and to get to know your strengths and weaknesses in that area. That’s why we’re not bound to desks in elementary – we can move about and talk with other students. Even if it means not doing work …unfortunately. No, I was exaggerating – with the freedom of movement and choice of work come a responsibility – to be productive. That responsibility greatens with your time in Arbor: to contribute to a group and to your class, and to be responsible enough to gain the trust of your teachers and classmates.
In Lower Elementary, we start Music and Art classes. We learned the fine arts of splatter paint and “Dotism”. The highlight of the social season back then was the Maypole Dance, in which we learned how to accidentally tie our partners in knots using ribbons – while making it all look like a dance. But I definitely don’t want to downgrade Patty, Brenda, or our old teacher Amy. Thanks to these teachers, we’ve improved in many ways in these eight years. If you compare peoples’ art in first grade to the same peoples’ art in middle school, it’s obvious that they’ve learned a lot of great methods, and the same goes for music. Though when my watercolor looks like splatter paint, I might have to be the exception.
Upper Elementary…here’s a rough picture of it. It’s Lower Elementary with deadlines, homework, Medicine Bow, plays, science fair projects, and spelling and geo bees. Plays were fun – I got to be a ticked-off god who beats up on the hero, a green-with-envy fairy king, and another god that trashes the hero. (In Middle School, I portrayed a trigger-happy, gun-toting pipe-smoker, so maybe you can see the trend.) In Upper Elementary, the concept of being an active learner really began for me. You were given a due date for something. You could finish the assignment whenever you liked, however you wanted, and at whatever speed, but you had to do it in the time that was given to you.
Besides the horror of homework, we were also introduced to the concept of working in a group. Asking four or five kids to sit down together and get something school-related and productive done always gets…mixed results. However, even if the finished product isn’t always perfect, working in groups is one of those “Montessori things” that we all had to go through. It’s about working out problems, teamwork, collaboration, cooperation, and all of those other things that you would find in, say, basketball. However, in the NBA, I doubt they ever had mediations. The basic idea behind mediations is one teacher (or sometimes a student who has no idea what to do) and some young kids sitting down and talking about a problem that the kids have with each other, and trying to solve it.
After a fancy luncheon at which the teachers give us all haiku and a verbal kick out the door, 6 th graders are thrust into the Middle School. After spending a week in a remote location being brainwashed with teamwork and cooperation (a.k.a. the ‘Orientation Trip’), these initiates are soon introduced to the two most dreaded words in Middle School: ‘reflect’ and ‘community’.
For reflections, we use journals, little books into which we pour our hearts out – or are supposed to, anyway. Since one of the big picture goals for Middle School is to develop a batch of analytical philosophers, asking us to contemplate things is a logical step. I think that though a chorus of groans comes up from the middle school students whenever we’re asked to journal, it helps in some subtle way. We write and think about how things went, what we learned, what we can do better next time, and sometimes scribble so it looks like we’re doing something. It’s nice to take a break from the hustle and bustle of life and write your thoughts for a bit in a quiet place.
Our teachers drag in people like Rob Setili to give us activities where we get to use our gray cells and start debate teams. People like him and Bob King give us a perspective on the real world that we wouldn’t have otherwise. Making us keen, teen, thinking machines is also why we have seminars on books featuring telepathic gorillas that explain why our civilization is going to crash like a plane without wings. While we would often rather be reading Harry Potter, these books give us something substantial and thought-provoking that we would never have otherwise. Like one hundred new vocabulary words.
This line of thought also leads to the reason why our teachers never give a direct answer to any of our questions. This form of communication is supposed to make us students think more and get answers to our questions without depending on our teachers to “spoon feed” them to us. Well, what it does do is make the students think our teachers are as clueless as us most of the time. The result works I think – though I’m not going to ask my teachers if it does.
The other buzzword in Middle School is ‘community’. Everything is filtered through the community. We have discussions on everything from whether or not to use plates for lunch to how to prevent the game of Sugby from turning into an all-out brawl. My fondest memory of community meeting is the time we spent an entire afternoon deciding why the old job system didn’t work. We eventually decided that we’re too lazy and need a job manager to scream at us every second to go do our jobs. Unfortunately, the job manager is one of us. Anyway, because of all this “togetherness”, we think of ourselves as one class, one community – instead of a bunch of cliques that avoid each other.
In Middle School, we try to create a place for ourselves in the community. We can do this through leadership roles, though it’s mostly up to the student to do this. It helps that everything that’s done in Middle School respects the uniqueness of the individual. This theme was carried throughout my entire time in school, and it’s an essential part of the diversity that so matters here at Arbor.
Arbor Montessori school gave us (graduates) many life lessons that we wouldn’t have gotten at a regular school. If you take out all of the bad jokes that I’ve made about Arbor in this speech, what’s left is some very good things about it. The great teachers at this school teach you how to be a self-motivated active learner, how to be a social yet productive student who can work out disputes, be an analytical thinker, and respect diversity, all the while developing your artistic skills.
When I interviewed at Paideia (so I could get an education after Arbor), my interviewer (who had never heard of me in his life) said to me, “So you’re one of Arbor’s protégés, eh?” Enough said.
