just too jarring and kaleidoscopic. There were too many rules, too many people and too much space for her to maneuver. Sometimes when I hugged my daughter goodbye, I could feel her heart pounding through the cloth of her shirt. The school’s philosophy could be summed up by the Chinese proverb, “Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” The teachers sought to make their charges self-sufficient in the very motor areas where Sara floundered. Children learned how to put on their coats by laying them backwards on the floor and flipping them over their heads, to cut carrots into circular slices with real paring knives. The teachers were unusually dedicated—devoting chunks of their free time to making new educational games or optimizing the classroom’s layout. The Montessori Method was the cornerstone of their belief system, so it was only natural that an unresponsive child and her bumbling mother would be seen as ungrateful. My daughter, as she repeatedly flipped the wrong end of her coat over her head and continually used the dull side of the paring knife, became an unwitting challenge to the teachers’ unwavering conviction that the tenets of Montessori were inviolate. It did not help that I was a former Montessori teacher. In fact, it made the whole situation more embarrassing. In Montessori lingo, a wellorganized, balanced child is known as a “Montessori child,” and here I was sending them the Montessori equivalent of the “Anti-child.” Of course, I should have known better. Deep down I realized Sara would never make it as a Montessori child, but I deceived myself through some form of magical thinking: my former colleagues would find a way to make things work for her. At first, the teachers considered my daughter a puzzling special case. We were granted certain allowances. I was permitted to walk Sara right to the door of her classroom long after other mothers were banished to the schoolyard. If a teacher saw me tying Sara’s shoe or wiping her nose, she looked the other way. The first time Sara got her school picture taken, I was allowed to accompany her onto the stage and squat down next to her chair while the camera flashed. I still have the picture: Sara is dressed in a green Polly Flinders dress; she stares straight ahead with a vacant expression. If you look closely at the bottom corner of the photograph, you can see the tip of my thumb tightly grasped in her fist Soon other problems developed. In each classroom, the puzzles and games were shelved on trays kept in orderly rows throughout the classroom. After you played with one of them, you were required to return the tray to the exact spot where you got it. Sara explained to me she was afraid to try
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