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In 1907, Maria Montessori founded the first Montessori school in Rome. Its overall purpose was to give four to seven year old children from low-income families a full-day educational program.

The idea quickly developed and grew in popularity and thus more Montessori schools were formed in Europe and India. It did not take long for the school method to cross over to the United States of America.

In fact, Montessori’s teaching methods created great interest in the United States from 1910 through 1920. Unfortunately, Montessori’s methods seem to be largely forgotten in the United States until the late 1950s.

It was around that time when a second Montessori movement started in America. This time, the main focus was on a set of private schools that served an almost entirely middle-class population.

The Montessori educational system struggled with it’s own success when it started having trouble finding enough teachers. In fact, it took that teacher shortage to start the creation of free-standing private Montessori teacher training centers. Each of these centers were not associated with any college or university and taught the Montessori teaching methods to aspiring educators.

In the late 1960s, some parents started to call for the public schools in their local areas to offer the Montessori education model for their elementary school children who had graduated from private Montessori pre-schools.

The public’s rush of support was given a boost by government funds being made available for new Montessori programs starting up in public school areas. Today, over one hundred U.S. school districts have some type of Montessori program.

But just why has Montessori become so popular ? Many believe it is due to the program’s ability to overcome three major problems that the public school systems are still faced with. While the public school system has been put into a state of upheaval, the Montessori school systems have flourished.

Using their unique teaching methods, Montessori students have demonstrated a consistently high level of reading comprehension and academic performance. In the book “Montessori Parents Guide”, we dive deeper into how a Montessori program is powerfully unique and sets itself aside from current teaching methods.

The Protoss Cannon Rush is the most infamous tactic in Starcraft 2 so far. Whether you are Zerg or Terran it is a giant pain in the rear. As tactics go, it’s dirty and works like a dream.

The core of the Protoss Cannon Rush is of course, cannons. They are hugely powerful and wipe out infantry like there’s no tomorrow.

And what do you want to do with those cannons? Yup. You wanna dump a few of them in your enemies base.

The Protoss Cannon Rush is a quick game ender. As you may have gathered from the name, it’s a ‘rush’ tactic meaning if you use it successfully the game will be over in less than 10 minutes. Excellent!

Against experienced players this is much harder to pull off due to

a) An experienced player will have been burned by this tactic on more than one occassion so will be on the look out for it

b) A good player will make sure he scouts pretty early on and will also know exactly what is going on at his base

So, let’s start…

Build up to a dozen or so probes and while doing so create a pylon at your ramp, along with a forge. You’ll also need to send the all important probe to your enemy’s base. Now a clever cannon rusher will ensure that his probe is not in the sight of the enemy or he’ll soon find that probe smashed into tiny pieces. Now while your mining all those minerals and setting up base, drop a pylon at your opponent’s base. Once this is being built you may wish to consider building a couple of cannons at your own base to prepare for a possible counter-rush.

Drop a cannon at the perimeter of your enemies visibility line and when it’s almost finished send your probe in to drop 2 more cannons in the base itself, but also within range of your original cannon. When your opponent sees you drop this 2nd/3rd cannon he’ll be incandescent with rage and send his worker units or light infantry equivalent to wipe out the emerging cannon. To then be blasted by your original cannon.

Zoom off with your probe, attempting to dodge any attacks and lay down another cannon and also a probe very close to it. This will allow you to lay cannons at will right inside your enemy’s base.

Cue game over, some insults maybe and yet another victory thanks to the super-sneaky, yet fabulously funny PROTOSS CANNON RUSH!

“We’ve taken care of everything. The words you hear, the songs you sing. The pictures that give pleasure to your eyes. It’s one for all and all for one. We work together, common sons. Never need to wonder how or why”-Neil Peart, RUSH

I was watching a RUSH video today and I saw how fitting these lyrics from “Temples of Syrinx ” were to the subject of this article. Recently I was showing some artwork I had done to a fellow christian. He took a quick glance at a few pieces,which incidentally depicted a young woman, then turned away and said “You should be doing that for the Lord” and walked away.

I sat there thinking that I’d like to shout after him, “Hey! I am doing this for the Lord!” but I held my tongue.

Since then though I have been thinking about that moment and many others in my life where fellow Christians have disapproved of art, music, television and movies that I like. I have, at times, knuckled under and tried to live my life trying to enjoy a narrowly defined list of activities that were acceptable to the Christians around me. I have gotten rid of all my rock music, stopped watching secular movies, limited my artistic talent to only creating work that depicted religious themes. The only books I read were religious texts and the only places I went were christian events or, if they were secular events, I went with a group of Christians.

I was OK with all of this because I wanted to be a good christian until I realized that it wasn’t only books, movies and TV that they wanted to censor but my very individuality as well.

Soon it became apparent that they wanted to control what I thought and what I said. The atmosphere was one of oppression where if I disagreed on a spiritual point I was accused of “living in self”. I was told I was being rebellious if I questioned the accepted doctrine. I came to see that dogma was more important than truth. If I wanted to belong I had to do and say as I was told.

Needless to say I shook the dust off of my feet once I finally left the church system. I knew that wasn’t how God intended life to be. He gave us all a mind and talents that He expects us to use. God will never ask us to deny our powers of reason.

“Isa 1:18 Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”

Let us reason together. Not only does God want us to accept Him as Lord but He expects us to use our intelligence to make that choice and not leave our uniqueness behind. If you think about it, whenever you’ve been told to conform to doctrine, was it God who told you…or was it a human being?