Franki Sibberson’s recent Choice Literacy essay “Fitness Boot Camp Helps Me Understand Struggling Readers” caught my interest, and I found myself returning to her ideas. While I am (fortunately!) not immersing myself in a fitness regimen, I have interests outside of my teaching life that have much to teach me. Most weekends, you’ll find me in my kitchen, looking through recipe files, and baking bread. Because I can’t eat all that bread myself (or I would be going to fitness boot camp), I share it with family, friends, and students.
Teaching and Baking Bread
To me, “breaking bread” together is the essence of community. The genuine conversations, the fond chat, the playful banter that occur as people talk and eat seem to create different bonds. I love the word companion because it derives from the phrase com pan or “with bread,” reflecting how we become friends as we share simple food together. When I’m baking bread or cooking for my students or family, I purposely slow down, and I’m very mindful and intentional about my creations. But until now, I haven’t used the baking itself as a metaphor for my teaching. What skills and insights can I bring to my teaching that derive from the world of cooking?
The time that I put into preparation is one important connection. I spend a lot of time choosing just the right ingredients—fresh, organic—looking over a whole array of possibilities to choose items that will appeal to all the senses. The connection to teaching preparation comes from exploring the world of possible resources around a subject area and appealing to my students’ senses—all their senses, taking into account the different languages of thought, including visual and movement orientation as well as verbal.
In terms of ingredients, different people I cook for have different needs. My mother has a gluten intolerance, but I can still make her bread from a variety of recipes using different flours made from rice, potato, or quinoa. Caryl needs to avoid dairy products, so I keep soy and rice alternatives on hand. My children Meg and Nathan simply won’t eat raisins or nuts or anything crunchy in their food, so I leave it out of theirs. I know it’s important for me to know what the most easily digestible ingredients for my students’ learning diets are, too. That means observing, listening, and getting to know them.
But I don’t believe it’s in anyone’s best interests for me to be a short order cook. Instead of composing a million separate dishes for a meal, I can expose people to new ingredients and recipes they wouldn’t taste otherwise, like quinoa soup, or quiche crust made with crunchy rice. When I’ve tried these recipes for my mother’s gluten-free diet, others in my family have found they like this new food well enough to ask for the recipes for their own cooking files. Likewise, students who aren’t used to exploring meaning through visual metaphor, poetry, or tableaux can learn new strategies along with their classmates.
There’s a spiritual side that’s hard to put into words, too. Creating “from scratch” provides a very different product—something with a different essence all together than the “store-bought” brand. Creating homemade curriculum has a different essence, too, from traditional textbook fare. It comes from the heart and hand, touch and feeling, I guess.
That brings me full circle to the connection to community. I want my classes to have that kind of “around the dining room table” talk that is like a real family dinner conversation. I want classroom conversations rich in story, jokes, entwined histories—conversations that spark new connections and forge deeper bonds.
Extensions to New-Teacher Conversations
Exploring how my passion for baking teaches me what I value in teaching has been an enlightening experience. I brought the idea to my new-teacher conversation group. I began by reading my own metaphor for teaching, and asked participants to share with a partner an outside-of-school passion. After talking with a partner about these interests and activities, we wrote for about 10 minutes on how this passion could serve as a metaphor for teaching. This brief writing time brought forth a diverse array of metaphors and sparked a rich discussion about teaching itself.
Tom is a woodworker. He told us he loves working with raw, unfinished material. What he appreciates most is working with the material; as he is shaping, sanding, and polishing it, he must recognize the beauty in the wood that he can bring out.
“Like a melody, I play the introduction, main part, and the end as I lead my students through the day,” Vicki, a pianist, told us. “Sometimes I find myself needing a bit of tuning, or warming up, like practicing individual keys, notes, or scales. As the day moves forward, I sometimes play with ease, but sometimes I can come to tricky fingering positioning. I stop, look things over, give a bit of time, and finally find some sort of solution. Sometimes it’s a perfect fix. Other times the notes still sound squeaky. But I move on with crescendos, allegros, faster and slower tempos. At the end of the day, the music sounded sweet, even if sprinkled with mistakes and practices; it can be recognized, and it does sound good.”
As other new teachers shared their passions and their teaching metaphors, we all learned a lot about the craft of teaching, and our community grew even closer. We’d like to publicly thank Franki Sibberson for her invitation to reflect on how we can open up our understandings of our students through exploring what we learn through our experiences outside of school.
