It’s All Fun And Games Until Somebody Gets Murdered, Montessori Teacher Warns

An ugly situation was averted during ‘circle time’ at Galway city’s Busy Bee Montessori yesterday, when three year old Jonathon Tierney briefly disrupted class.

Newly qualified teacher Sally O’Meara recalled how she had to take a deep breath to centre herself, before following the Montessori philosophy of using “earnest words to convey that a child may not interrupt”.

“I’d just started singing ‘the clean up song’,” O’Meara, who is known to her class as “Miss Sally” revealed, “and all the children had joined in, as usual.”

“So we’re all going ‘This is the way we tidy the room, tidy the room, tidy the room,’ when he jumps to his feet and pretends to be conducting us all with his pencil? When I saw the other children laughing, I realised the situation was spiralling out of control,” Sally explained.

“So I made the T for timeout sign with my hands and quietly but firmly asked Jonathon if he wanted the police to put him in jail”.

“Of course he started to cry, saying he was ‘sorry and wanted his mammy’.”

O’Meara winked then, as she leaned forward to say “And that’s when I knew I had him?”

Sally spelled out how she could easily have tripped and fallen over with the pencil going into her eye and killing her.

“Because it’s all fun and games,” she explained, “until somebody gets murdered…and then where will they be?”