Dear Glendale Montessori Families,
Marta Tyler began her career at Glendale Montessori School in 1979. Marta earned a B.S. in chemistry in college, but despite her passion for chemistry, she was dissatisfied with the work opportunities available to her at that time. Fortunately for all of us, she took a job as a teacher’s assistant in one of the primary classrooms at GMS. Marta fell in love with the Montessori Method and went back to school to be trained in the method. She received her Montessori Primary Training from Mrs. Franca Tidoni, who was herself trained directly by Dr. Maria Montessori. After taking a few years off following the birth of her son, Hal, she added Lower Elementary Montessori Training to her resume. At that time, Glendale Montessori Elementary School went only to the third grade level. Because she wanted her son to have the benefit of a Montessori education through sixth grade, Marta once again went back to school and received her Upper Elementary training – and then created the upper elementary program for GMS. The first sixth grader graduated from our school in June of 1992. For the next thirty years, Marta devoted her skills and attention to the students in our upper elementary program. Her continuing passion for chemistry resulted in her creation of a chemistry curriculum for the fifth and sixth grade classes. An avid and life-long student herself, Marta has taken a variety of courses and has pursued training opportunities to enrich the learning experience of her students.
In the last two years, as our world was plunged into a global pandemic, Marta truly showed her dedication to education and to her students by adapting to online teaching platforms, and she worked tirelessly to adapt the Montessori curriculum to virtual learning. Even in her final year of school, as she approached her retirement date, she continued to explore, find new materials, and bring them to the classroom to share with our students.
The legacy of a teacher is the impact on the lives of her students. Marta has inspired many of her students to pursue careers in the sciences. Below is a tribute from one of her students, Patrick Minassian, a medical student at UC Irvine Medical.
I am so grateful to have had Marta as my elementary school teacher for such critical years of my development. For 3 years, Marta gave me the best possible exposure to life science (and all subjects in general) that one could possibly get as an elementary school student. The way she creatively and methodically presented all of her lessons, from our weekly Current Science pamphlets to our spelling and vocabulary lists, made me look forward to the start of every week. Not only did she provide the best possible approach to teaching, but she cultivated a world-class learning environment. One way she achieved this optimal learning environment was by providing us with 30 minutes of quiet time, where we would return from lunch to sit in silence while listening to classical music through over-ear Sennheiser headphones. From curating our calming music-listening sessions to meticulously presenting the workings of the human body in a systems-based fashion, Marta provided me with the best possible tools to explore my academic interests. I even included this fact in my medical school application, where I wrote about how Marta first introduced me to the wonders of the human immune system that ultimately sparked my desire to pursue immunology through medicine. My 3 years under the tutelage of Marta marked a pivotal point in my development that helped me get to where I am today, a 3rd year medical student at UC Irvine School of Medicine with a Master’s in Immunology from the University of Oxford. I have no doubt that Marta has similarly inspired hundreds of her students to pursue their respective passions and can only hope that my future children’s teachers are as thoughtful, caring, and inspiring as her.
While we will definitely miss Marta’s daily presence in our classroom, we are so happy for her to start this next chapter of her life as a full-time grandmother. She will continue to stay connected to the school by dropping in for guest group lessons from time to time.
Sincerely,
Andrea Ventura