A Masterpeice

While my family may disagree, I actually love to cook. Not that my family reads this blog, but the reason they would disagree is that I don’t do it as often as I probably should. Yet, what they don’t understand is that they are the most boring eaters in the world. I live with three very picky eaters. I am NOT a picky eater (obviously). I am adventurous with food. I love playing around with different foods and different spices and even techniques of cooking. I love to watching cooking shows and create my own dishes from those shows. It is just hard to do that when your family will not eat many things. Yet, most times, they seem to enjoy what I’ve created.

It is not often that my husband and I are in the kitchen together. In the mornings he is in the kitchen alone making his breakfast while I am getting ready for school and in the evening, he is still at football practice while I construct supper. Yet, the other night we happened to be together in the kitchen. He was talking to me as I prepared supper.  As I moved around the kitchen making my secret family recipe for biscuits, he suddenly asked me why I didn’t have a measuring cup out and I just laughed. My husband is in the medical field….numbers matter, precise calculations matter, exact directions matter. Me……not so much. I experiment, I dabble, I invent, and I create. I’ve probably never made the same recipe more than one time. I read recipes all the time, but I never really use them exactly as they are written. This is how I was taught to cook by my family’s Helena. I call her Helena because she was much more than a maid, cook, housekeeper, nanny. She was our everything. I spent hours watching her cook. Helena never used a recipe because Helena couldn’t read.  She, like me, loved to cook. She loved making different things. She had lots of tricks that she taught me through the years like how to make sure a pound cake never falls, how to make perfect rice every single time, how to make dumplings that would make you cry they’re so good, and how to make biscuits. Man, oh man, I can hardly eat a biscuit anywhere because they never compare to Helena’s biscuits.

As I was talking to my husband about how I could make these perfect biscuits every time without a recipe, I started thinking about the beginning of the school year and I started thinking about how we deliver content. I’ve always been one of those to quote the cheesy saying, “I don’t teach content, I teach children.” And I really believe that. Just like I am in the kitchen, I never taught the same lesson, standard, curriculum, etc. the same way twice. I either changed it because it didn’t work the first time, I realized a better way, my children were different than last year’s students, or someone showed me how to do it more effectively.  I was told in college that good lesson plans were the ones where anyone could come in, read them, and be able to teach it just as well as you could. I believed that early on in teaching-before I realized that good teaching is an art. I remember one time in my classroom I had been out sick, like very sick. Upon my return I was doing my best to just be at school and I had not prepared lesson plans. I thought-I got this-I’ve been doing this long enough that I could wing it. I was wrong. Lesson plans were essential for my success in the classroom. Each year, I would pull out my lesson plans from the previous year and I would start playing with them. Just like my cooking recipes, I started with the basic design of each lesson, unit, or theme and continually added or took away parts until it was perfect. I used collaboration with my peers to reflect on how it was done, what they could add, what our current students needed, and how together we could make it better. Many times I was very successful and sometimes I failed at my attempts to teach a concept, a standard, or a theme. 

Just like in the kitchen where I experiment, dabble, invent, and create based on what ingredients I have and what my people need (i.e. Rosebro1 needs gluten free, Rosebro2 need protein and carbs, and Hubby needs enough for supper and lunch the next day), our lesson planning should be the same. We should look at the needs of our students, use what resources we have, and use our art to create the most amazing learning for our students. What you will find when you stop using route lesson plans, is that your students learn more, you are more engaged, and the art of teaching becomes a masterpiece.