Nice classmates and long lunch breaks, but where are all the hot Irish men???

I was nervous but excited standing outside of the classroom at St. Nicholas Montessori College on my first day! I was nervous about seeing what my peers were like and how they would welcome me. I was also excited starting at a new college in a different country and especially the Montessori Method, which is new to me, was appealing. I hadn’t got a timetable; I just knew what date to be there so I showed up at 10am and was told that the class had already started.

Opening the doors to the classroom I got a shock. I was standing in the doorway looking at a room full of girls; there was not a single guy in the classroom! I had heard that there were only few guys in the college but I hadn’t expected that there would be none. I have never tried being in an all-girls class so this is an experience for me too.

The girls were nice and made a great deal out of making me feel welcome. They all talked to me and I was even invited home with some of them to eat during lunch. That’s how long the lunch breaks are here, we have time to go home and eat! And I have Fridays off!

Getting into the class the last week before exams, there was not much time to filling me in on things, but I found out a little more about the Montessori Method than I already knew. In Montessori colleges they don’t teach differentiation as one thing because a Montessori teacher always plans his teaching around the pupils so that every pupil has an opportunity to learn.

They also have their own Montessori materials that they use for teaching and the students get courses in using the materials. In order to pass the “material-subjects” the students have to pass an exam at the end of the year.

My first week here was unfortunately afflicted with illness and the two following weeks were exam-weeks at the college so I didn’t get there much, although I had to do a presentation during exam-week called peer teaching. All the students had to teach something to the class in 10 minutes, and it didn’t matter what it was we taught. This was done in order to get some experience in teaching. I taught my peers how to dance the Faroese national dance. I tried to use different strategies, doing a presentation on the history of the Faroe Islands and the dance and then getting them up to do the actual dance (that’s how much I could manage in 10 min).

My peers did it very differently. All their lessons were done in presentation form; weren’t very active lessons and we didn’t get to try to do what they tried teaching us.

Being in classes during the last week I noticed that the teachers also do their lectures differently than they do at home. At home, we usually get to try out the strategies that we are supposed to use when teaching; here everything is done in presentation form and the only time we get to do activities is in the material classes. There we get to try out the materials.

We have learnt how to use their language materials, and they are all very tactile. You don’t write a lot, but rather cut out and put together words. When learning the word groups they put cut out black triangles over the nouns, big red circles over the verbs and so on. Everything has its own colour and shape. When we learn how to use the material, we don’t learn the theory of why it is good to do it this way and how it helps the pupils learn better, which I find strange. That’s very different from how it’s usually being done in my regular classroom at Blaagaard/KDAS back in Denmark.

It is also different at what stage you learn what things. As we started the second semester of the second year her, Gardner’s 8 intelligences and cooperative learning were introduced to us. This is one of the things we started learning at the beginning of our first year at Blaagaard/KDAS.

Unfortunately I haven’t been in college enough to figure out how everything is being taught here. All in all I think it seems very interesting and I’m looking forward to learning more about their methods!