montessori ed

The Super Bowl is the championship game of the National Football League (NFL), the premier association of professional American football.  Read more here at Wikipedia

And with a total U.S. audience estimated to be around 150 million viewers, Thomas Harpointner, CEO of the e-business and interactive consulting company AIS Media, says many advertisers don’t want to miss it either.

“The commercials are the most talked-about commercials on the planet,” he said. “And that’s what makes the commercials and the opportunity to advertise on the Super Bowl so special.  So for a company that is just launching, or launching a new product line, or is making a big company shift, the Super Bowl offers a unique platform.”

Another unique feature of advertising on the Super Bowl is that even many who are not football fans, tune in just to watch the commercials.

VOANews.com

The Montessori Super Bowl Ad Project is aiming to reach this audience soon

The immediate and long-term GOALS of the Montessori Super Bowl Ad campaign are threefold:

1. 1)To air a Montessori commercial during the Super Bowl.
2. 2)To raise awareness about Montessori education.
3. 3)To jumpstart a Montessori movement that will land Montessori in the middle of the national education discussion.

With what is already projected to be the single largest television audience in history, at over one hundred million viewers, join our team and help put Montessori in the game!

Take a few minutes to check out the website and consider how you can help this ambitious effort to advance the Montessori movement and reach the tipping point.

I “worry” at the challenge of expanding Montessori education in my free time, which is not to say that I am either obsessed and overwrought or that I have the silver bullet answer. Some people do Sudoku or crossword puzzles when bored, I think about expanding Montessori education, and specifically AMI because it is the organization in which I trained and am a member.

AMI has training centers around the world, and it is my understanding that the ideal class size for a training course is approximately 20-25 students. An ideal primary class size is 30 children and 1 trained teacher. I was thinking about the level of school and enrollment growth is necessary to support a training center under the ideal circumstance that each graduate starts teaching immediately. I am a visual thinker and made this image to represent the information.

Each training course requires 1 trainer (purple) and 1 training center (red building) to produce about 24 trained guides (orange) who require about 24 primary environments (green) to follow approximately 720 children (red).    This of course assumes that teachers are entering established environments, rather than creating a new environment which would require 240 children (red) rather than 720.

I don’t have access to data or statistics regarding teacher turn over or school growth, but I do receive the AMI-USA newsletter and can draw some conclusions as a result.

There are 10 Primary (3-6) Level courses in the United States (Atlanta, Miami, Hartford, Washington D.C., St. Paul, St. Louis, Dallas, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco).  Many of these courses are academic year formats, while others are summer course formats that only graduate guides every other summer.

Next year I estimate that (6 Academic Programs +1/2 of 4 Summer Programs =) 8 courses will graduate approximately 150 trained Montessori guides (assuming an average of 18 students complete each course and pass the exams).

At the time this article was published there were 19 Primary Guide positions listed on the AMI-USA website.  Admittedly this is not the peak hiring season, but I will be surprised if there are 150 positions advertised in the spring.  (I will check again in a few months).

So here are my unanswered questions:

If there are 150 graduates each year, and it is unlikely that 150 new jobs open each year, how many graduates begin teaching immediately?  How many never go into teaching?  How many choose to work as assistants and how many work as assistants because it is the only job available?

How many teachers retire each year?

How many new environments open each year?

What can be done to open more environments to meet the supply of trained guides each year?