The Fine Art of Cooking

       I don't recall where I first heard the idea that giving students too detailed a rubric (or, I guess, and sort of excessive directions) is akin to simply asking them to follow a recipe.  They may produce an acceptable meal, perhaps even a tasty one. They are, however, very unlikely to ever become true chefs.
       A recent TV viewing experience affirmed the truth of this metaphor in quite literal terms. My wife and I tuned into Chopped Junior on the food network because one of her college friend's 13-year-old daughter was competing. In case, like me, you have no idea what the premise of the show is, I'll briefly explain. There is a certain food theme; in this case, it was fast food. Contestants are given a few random ingredients and told what they have to prepare within a set time. They can augment with whatever is available in the kitchen. After each round one person is eliminated by the adult judges. It's all high-paced, creative, dramatic, and surprisingly entertaining. To remove any suspense, Annabelle won. And her victory captures the larger point.
       She has seven siblings, and I believe she's one of the younger children. When she was around seven, as if life weren't hectic enough, her father lost his job. Annabelle was often told to find what was in the kitchen and figure out something to cook. She began by following basic instructions, only to soon begin branching out and later beginning to experiment in all sorts of ways. Nothing on the show flustered her.*
       Her final opponent was a young man whose two parents are chefs, and he had been training at their feet for years. While clearly talented, he seemed unable to improvise nearly as well. More than that, the pressure clearly impeded his performance.
       It's not that hard to figure out the secret sauce.


*It's also interesting, and perhaps relevant, that she is home-schooled.

A Teacher's Ten First Jobs

                Jessica Lahey’s essay “Teaching: Just Like Performing Magic,’ which recounts an essay with Teller (of Penn and Teller fame), contains a great deal of inspiration.  It was first published nearly two years ago, and I recently encountered it again because of some Tweets. While I highly recommend the piece, as I do any of her writing that I’ve encountered, one line in it jarred me. It’s part of a pull quote, and I’m not sure if it comes from Lahey or Teller. It reads: “The first job of the teacher is to make the student fall in love with the subject.”

                I have so many problems with this statement that I’m unsure where to begin. If I try to thoroughly explain each of them, I’ll have the outline for a book. If I try to summarize, I’ll wind up with a frustrating mass of frustration. So I’ll reduce my basic argument to one rather sweeping assertion.  When our primary focus becomes teaching a subject, we create many of the other problems that plague education, because we forget an essential truth: that what we’re really teaching are young people.

                With that in mind, I’d like to propose ten other possible first jobs of a teacher, perhaps with the subject as context or even tool, although what that is really doesn’t matter.

     --Get to know and love your students.

     --Remember they are developing young people, not professors to be.

     --Tap into their innate curiosity by asking students what they believe and what they want to know.

     --Create a safe classroom culture.

     --Make learning relevant.

     --Share your own ongoing learning (not just that from the past).

     --Decide what risk you’re going to take.

     --Clarify—to them and to yourself—what the most important goals are.

     --Develop a plan for moving out of their way.

     --Shrink your ego so they can grow.

While each of these could be the first job, together they are the job. Do such work, and then a nice by-product may be that students come to love a subject.