Cooking and Education

We've had a spell of cold weather here in Michigan and, as always, cold weather finds me in the kitchen baking. Don't know why-it just does. So what does that have to do with teaching and technology? For some reason, I started comparing baking cookies with teaching. Somehow, the analogy worked.

As I began gathering my ingredients and utensils, I started thinking about what goes in to planning my lessons. How I spend hours, and sometimes days, finding just the right mix of information and activities to interest and engage my students, whether it's in a sixth grade computer class or a 9th grade literature class. How the quality of the materials I find, just like the quality of ingredients, can make or break the end product.

Following the recipe brought me to the step of lesson planning. Due to the the schedule I have this year, I am writing two lesson plans a week. Balancing these two diverse curriculums is similar in my mind to writing quality lesson plans, plans that cover a variety of benchmarks and standards as required by my state and my curriculum director.

Next comes the measuring of ingredients. I thought back to my previous week of school, thinking of my successes and my failures, of the things that worked and of the things that didn't. Of students I reached through structure and humor, and students that were totally out of my reach, caught up in their own lives and totally not interested in anything I had to say or offer to them in terms of support.

Mixing the ingredients: a blending of ideas, thoughts and material to create. So much like education itself and the day to day needs of what we as teachers bring to our classroom. How everything is better with a little bit of humor, and why it's sometimes necessary to add heavy ingredients into something to make the mixture blend well.

Baking was next. How like the final product-whether we are talking about written or oral testing, projects, or the like. How much time and effort is put into that final effort by both the teacher and the students is what shows at the end-are the goals met? Does the cake rise?

When the finished product is out in the open, either on the table or in the classroom, the final test is given. Assessment begins. Did the student meet the rubric criteria set out in the classroom? Does the food present well and taste good?

The proof is in the pudding.