But in hindsight I could tell it depends heavily on the teachers as well as the students you are saddled with because of how much group stuff there is. There was clear divisions between the kids who would reliably do their work and the kids who procrastinated and played around flicking pencils at eachother all day. This was generally possible while the main classroom teacher was busy with some subset of students for a lesson or some other work.
Once we got access to desktop computers we replaced the pencil flicking all day with games. They'd be in the main classroom but we'd just turn the crt monitors to the side to hide it. This was long before IT surveillance tools, we had full internet access too. Gameboys a plenty.
There was a lot of fluid experimentation however. At one point we took all the shelving in the room and turned it in such a way to create sort of cubicles. I think the idea was to get the kids who probably had ADHD to lock in and do their work more vs being tempted to socialize and screw around all day with their friends. Eventually they banned us from turning the CRT monitors as well.
Would a more rigid school structure help other kids? Sure, probably, but I don't think what public school was doing would have helped those kids much. Honestly montessori is a lot like the adult working world now that I am in that and see the parallels. A lot less handholding and you needing to not give into procrastination and ask mentors for individual direction from time to time. Group work and discussion coupled with independent work. Project based education that is more like actual real life work projects vs the dry lecture/memorize/exam patterns. That being said it was more "traditional" and less montessori towards the end as they had to prepare you for a proper highschool setup, so more formally scheduled classes and a lot less free time in the main classroom.
