So I'd also see the "checking things off" as a red flag. Even in a large Montessori school teachers should be able to circulate and see what children are doing. They should be able to see and note which children give up on a material when it gets hard and perhaps suggest an easier material or else offer encouragement to stick it out longer -- but still let the child make the call. They need to be asking themselves why the child isn't "finishing."
Sing it, sister!
In our mid-year conference at the Montessori pre-K, when DH and I were griping that DS7 (then 4.5yo) wasn't being allowed to read yet though he was reading simple chapter books at home, the teacher said that he hadn't been "checked off" for the pre-reading exercises. The sticking point was the "sound boxes," boxes containing little items that all started with the same sound. He had been doing work like that for literally 2/3 of his life, if not more! It was not interesting to him, he had done it once already but the teacher didn't check him off for some reason, so he just wasn't interested in doing it again. He wasn't allowed to do anything else until he completed that task, so he just skipped the language arts center altogether and did other things. The teacher actually thought he was BEHIND in reading!
Clueless!
"We know he can do the sound boxes," said the teacher, "but he hasn't completed them for me."
"If you know he can do them," said my highly logical DH, "then why do you need to check him off? Isn't the point of the checking off that you know he can do them?"
Faced with our insistence and logic--and the voice of a man, I suspect, which makes my feminist blood boil!--they finally (FINALLY!) caved and let him skip something. Not everything--he still had to do a bunch of pre-reading nonsense that he'd mastered years earlier, but they finally let go of the sound boxes. I suspect they also started watching him more closely, probably in the hopes of proving us wrong, frankly. But it worked in DS's favor because they saw we were right.
DS leapt ahead, and by the end of the year, he was the only kid in the whole school who didn't have to read a book twice to be checked off for it. They finally got that if he did it, it was really done. *sigh* It only took 3/4 of the year...
To this day, DH and I call any dumb hurdle that an educator won't let go of, no matter how pointless for the particular child, a "sound box."
