Gratuitous Montessori Posting

As regular readers know, I like to indulge in a moderate amount of baiting concerning St. Marie of the Blessed Educational Method. This gets to be a bit hard on the Missus (a Montessori teacher) since she invariably goes for it and removing the hook from her throat can sometimes be a painful operation.

So in the spirit of barblessness for a change, allow me to pass on the fact that her class of lower elementary students just got back their national testing results. Of the thirty-odd kids that she and her co-teacher manage, only two tested to their own grade levels. All the rest tested above, some significantly so. Well done, indeed.

And just by way of a bit of gratuitous Proud Parent bragging, the eldest Llama-ette is finishing up her second grade year. On a battery of eleven different subject fields, she tested to an average fifth grade equivalent. Her reading vocabulary was at the sixth grade level and in "mathematical processes", which the test defines as number facts, computation with whole numbers, computation in context and computation/symbolic notation, she tested to the ninth grade, acing the section. Yikes.