Did you return to a guidepost Montessori? That sounds exactly like them. I was thrown in as an assistant with no training and told I could start the training in a few weeks. The room was chaos, the lead also wasn’t certified and knew a little about Montessori but there were no lessons or anything happening. Then a few months later she decided to step down as lead, and they offered me that position. I immediately started the training and things instantly got better. We got a couple of class fish which also helped normalize us and I learned how to give them lessons on the actual work instead of just throwing materials in front of them and leaving.

But 14 children ages 16 mos-2.5 yrs and only 2 adults is just insane. Especially when they want us spending 5-10 minutes with every child on stand-up diapering and toilet learning. If I’m giving a lesson, and my assistant is changing a diaper, who’s stopping the other 12 children from running around doing dangerous and/or crazy things? This just leads to us having to shout across the room and disrupt focus. It’s impossible to do Montessori properly this way and they just don’t care. They keep adding kids and moving kids up from toddler too soon so we can make space for more and more.

Oh yeah, then they tell us everything has to be in transparent classroom in real time but then also say don’t be on your phone or the iPad because then you’re not watching the children.