Break the Breakable

“Cring......”

The sound of breaking glasses ringing in the air of the Clover Montessori classroom.

The teachers were in their quickest to dismiss the children near the scene of the broken jar, and took up their cleaning roles swiftly to ensure the broken pieces were all cleared away.

“I didn’t do it on purpose...” Covie, who was 4 years old, said with a tiny voice, standing by the side of the scene.

“It’s okay.” said her classmate Yohan, who was barely 4 years old. 

The teachers maintained their composure, and they did what they always did when any child broke something in the class accidentally. There was no blaming, there was no questioning like “why did you do that?”, there was only show of concern to check if the child was hurt by any broken pieces.

“I didn’t do it on purpose.” Covie continued saying in a tiny voice.

“It’s okay, it’s okay.” said a few classmates who stood close to her, and their tone was comforting and relaxing. Their tone totally reflected their teachers’ manner of handling matters like this. The teachers asked her calmly what happened, and she said she was just trying to take the colour pencils, and the jar tipped over. That was it, no more questioning, and the children all went back to their positions before the accident happened and continued with their unfinished work.

How would you usually handle situation like this?

Would you start blaming the teachers placing breakable jars in the learning environment?

Why would the teachers place breakable jars in the learning environment?

I can answer the last question.

It is when a child breaks the breakable or see her friend does that allows her to understand not all things are unbreakable. It is when they learn to handle things with care, they learn to focus when they move things around, they learn that mistakes like this is forgivable and they move on by being more careful.

But if we start blaming the teacher, the child, or the jar, what are we trying to achieve here?

Everything can be blamed... people, situation, but just not ownself.

This results in developing a mindset of no accountability. Dangerous.

The children in this Montessori classroom internalized their observation of their teacher’s demeanour and exhibit it in their behaviour. They take after adults’ attitude towards incidents and act upon it using the way that they have observed and learned subconsciously.

Many unexpected things happen each day, the way adults handle the problem is often observed by the children, who benchmark the adults as they are their learning models.

Note: The names of the children have been changed to maintain confidentiality.

Written by Toh Chaz Yee

About the author： 

She is a psychologist and the Head Directress of Clover Learning Centre. She is a true educator at heart, who always instills the value of education into the vast arrays of teaching. Be it Montessori, music and behavioural education, she sees things from a wide education perspective. With 20 years of teaching experience in Malaysia, Singapore and UK, she fully understands that the real education starts from Parenting. Hence, she hopes this blog can help parents understand their children better, and in turn parents understand themselves. She believes that it is from here that parents can be inspired to work on their own being so to nurture the little beings that they have brought lives to this world.