Silence in the Montessori Environment
“Silence is sometimes the best answer”
The Dalai Lama
When I joined work as a Montessori adult in a Primary environment, one of the activities which had caught my curiosity was the Silence Activity. Could thirty-five children and three adults control their movements and stay still together as one? The Silence Activity in a Montessori environment is not a way of reprimanding the children for being noisy or otherwise. It is not called for while banging on a desk or by asking the children to put a finger on their lips. It is shown. Indeed the deafening silence that follows the request for silence is beautiful, where only the fan whirs around and plays spoilsport. Even a child, who is unable to sit still and who wishes to move around and run due to deviations, brings his voice down to a low hum and slowly becomes calm enough to be silent for a few beautiful seconds. This inner discipline left me in awe of the child and his potential. Little did I know that this would be the first of many ‘silences’ at a Montessori House of Children to surprise me.
A famous person once said, ‘to learn more, make sure you are the dumbest person in the room’. This is pretty much how I feel in a Montessori environment.
In a Montessori House of Children, every child is usually engrossed in an activity. They could be working on their mats and at their chowkis, or talking about a picture to their friend or cleaning the floor. A famous person once said, ‘to learn more, make sure you are the dumbest person in the room’. This is pretty much how I feel in a Montessori environment. The intelligence that you find everywhere is overwhelming and at times stunningly beautiful. I find that this intelligence thrives in those few minutes or seconds when a child is engrossed in work. When a child discovers something while working with the means of development, there seems to be a moment where the child’s entire body becomes still and silent and a little epiphany takes place inside him or her. While presenting the Traditional Names of numbers – 11-19 to a child (who was already able to count to 20 thanks to various other stimuli at home and in society), I found his entire body tense up when I kept a bead of ‘one’ near a bead bar of ‘ten’ and asked him to count. His eyebrows were slightly furrowed and his eyes were focused on the beads. The second I revealed to him that after ten, we count the bead of ‘one’ as ‘eleven’, his eyes opened wide and his body was still for a couple of seconds. That silence showed me that a revelation had happened.
There is also the silence which precedes a discovery or association of concepts by a child. While working with a Picture Series envelope where all the pictures were different- twig, nest, hand, drum, the child stopped and looked at the pictures silently. She then observed that twigs were used for building nests and the hand was used to play the drum. This association was very creative, to say the least, and was totally uncalled for. I once presented the Chit Game- where chits from 0-9 are picked up by children and kept a secret. They later must pick up the quantity mentioned on the chit from a box full of similar objects. The child who has 0 on his chit usually ends up being the child who loves to work with large quantities. This child was shocked into silence when he realized that 0 not only ‘meant nothing’ according to the Spindle Boxes, but also meant that he would pick up no object. There was anxiety, shock and denial on his face as he checked with me to make sure that he couldn’t take any counters. I asked him to go to the Spindle Boxes and check again if the 0 compartment had any spindles in it. After doing this, he expressed amazement, a bit of sadness, then finally a serene look came over his features and he was still.
There are also the silences which tell me something is wrong. The silence when a child chooses to block out some ‘advice on the ground rules’, or looks at my hands rather than my eyes when I’m being a bit boring keeps me on my toes. There was once a child who was rather quiet and wouldn’t talk to me for an entire day. I was surprised by the looks of disappointment that I received throughout the day. On speaking to the parent, I found out the source of the problem. The little girl had told her mother during the group activity ‘‘Aunty had said only the person whose name I call out may answer.”
However, I had called her name to ask her what was a duck’s young one called. A six year old nearby gave the answer aloud before this girl could. I spoke a little about the duckling and moved on, without noticing that this girl was shocked that aunty had forgotten the ground rule. (She implied that I usually do follow the ground rules and this was a major compliment). On apologizing to her for the same, she nodded her head as if to say, ‘Alright, I have excused you this once‘. These are a few of the silences that I noticed in the Montessori House of Children. You could say, they stunned me into silence too!
