The Full Montessori

hen Darth and I found ourselves parents, we threw ourselves into it with the customary zeal we apply to all our endeavors. We were in it to win it. So when it came time to put Sarah into some kind of school, we wanted it to be something where she learns. We expected her to come home speaking Sanskrit and levitating the dog. We wanted her to know the table settings in nine different cultural wedding banquets. We wanted her to curse in French, bitch about Descartes, and draw Leibniz diagrams in the spilled milk from her cheerios. Our daughter was clearly a genius and nothing in the Orlando environs really measured up. We combed the locals and the yellow pages and then we discovered, right across the road from us, a Montessori school.

MONtesSORi. We gazed upon it in mute stupefaction, like first-time toddlers just inside the gates of Disneyland. We practically drooled. Not only was there a MON te SOR ee school in our neighborhood--we could afford it. It was like the Hummer version of a daycare. Intimidating, overbearing, ridiculous and far fucking more than anyone needed ever, and whenever we parked our little SUVbaby next to other kids all we had to do was mention that she was in MONteSORri and they shut the hell up. It was stainless-steel-riveted modern parental class distinction. Just what our baby needed.

So we packed up our little darling and enrolled her. With Nazis.

I had reservations the first day. The paperwork they sent home had more misspellings than a ransom note. If you wanted to watch your child in class, you couldn't actually go inside. You had to look in through a video monitor. You couldn't even look in through a window. But I dropped my reservations the instant I saw one of my old editors walking across the parking lot. He parked his SUV, got out in a suit, and walked his kid into the back door of the place. He saw me and I could actually see his opinion about me change. He'd last known me when I was a mere copy boy submitting a few club reviews. Now here I was, a father, and my kid was going to rub shoulders with his kid at MONteSORri. Clearly I was blue-blazer material.

My reservations returned full force a few days later when the school called me in. My daughter was causing a scene, apparently she needed to spend a lot of time in the 'quiet time' area. This didn't seem like a big deal to me. The chick was three years old and though I really did want the est for her and yeah yeah yeah I wanted her to learn languages and higher math and all that bull hockey, I wasn't an idiot. A kid who wants to chill out at three is not a cause for alarm but here I was having a sit down with the school superintendent and the teacher. I asked them why it was such a big deal and the teacher, a woman barely into her low 20s, gave me a micro lecture about Sarah's group integration dynamics and some other crap I missed because my eyes glazed over.

I somehow managed not to kill this woman and said I'd see what I could do. I asked if I could look in on the classrooms and they explained the video porthole system and I gritted my teeth and went home and kicked a doorjamb and told my wife.

So my mother in law who, though she is 22-cats crazy, is a highly practical woman in all other regards, went for me as I had to work. She reported that the teacher operated as if there was some kind of invisible shield between her and the children. My motherinlaw was spittin' pissed and indignant and called them a bunch of Nazis. She said that while she watched, the teacher almost never spoke to the children and never, ever touched them, much less gave any of them a hug. Before I could even roll my eyes the phone rang. I needed to come to the school immediately--Sarah had caused a disruption.

So there I am again, my daughter in another room clearly bleary eyed from crying, and me with the teacher and the dominatrix of the joint at a tiny table. They explain that Sarah had refused to go outside for her morning exercise and that when pressed, she had stripped naked and lain spread eagle, face down, on the floor and screamed. I'm looking at the two women who are telling me this without a trace of humor without a flicker of a grin and I'm thinking my daughter, three years old and prone to nudity, has their number.

The teacher rubs her head with both hands like she's been up for thirty-six hours or something and says 'this is getting difficult. I don't know what to do.' I look at this poor, wan, exhausted women and think the room must be teeming with children and she's just overwhelmed and I ask her how many kids she has and she says seven. Like it's Dikensonian. Like she should get a medal. Like she's embattled. I stand up and ask for my daughter. I tell her she ought to go try working at a real school where teachers have upwards of 40 kids in a class. I tell her she ought to be ashamed of herself for having only 7 kids and not being able to handle it and I tell her she ought to try hugs for a control method. Then I called them Nazis.

I found a different place for my daughter, a catholic school daycare, where she was embraced, quite literally, by a cute woman named Betty who was running a rambunctious class of 15 kids all by her lonesome. They were all smiling and running around and having a good time. The place smelled like a school. They told me I could walk right in any time. And the entire time she was there, Sarah never stripped naked.