Carolina Matthews

Having just finished my Masters of Arts in Teaching, I am currently between school and work. Being summer and all, finding a teaching job in a grade school is nearly impossible. As a result, I oscillate between being discouraged and dedicating all the attention I neglected to direct at our home during the final months of my Masters: the floors are now always shining, the laundry is (almost) always folded in the drawers, the cars are washed whenever there is sun… But I still feel unproductive because I am not really helping with bills.

Two days ago, however, the light came through a suggestion from Hubby: “Why don’t you take this time and finish your book?”

The background

In 2003 I started teaching cooking to children in a bilingual school in Sao Paulo, Brazil. My students ranged from 4-12 years of age, and each lesson was planned with their abilities in mind, intellectual as well as physical.

As I became more aware about the advantages of introducing the wonders of cooking in a learning environment, I grew increasingly serious about the materials I wanted to use. I designed a program that would evolve as children did, beginning with basic concepts such as pouring, stirring, adding, and recognizing simple ingredients such as flour, water, milk, sugar, etc., and evolving towards measuring and independently preparing the recipes. In 1st grade children were becoming familiar with the differences among chopping, dicing, and slicing, and developing the motor skills to perform each one of these safely. Second graders started to work more emphatically with pre-defined tasks in small groups, making sure everyone had the experiences as a reader, a leader, a measurer, a mixer, a washer and a fetcher before anyone repeated a task. In 3rd grade I guided children through more complex ideas, such as problem-solving how to divide the work or how to prepare a recipe that calls for 2 eggs when you have only 1 per group. The 4rth graders had the most autonomy of all: after learning about certain types of food they were asked to research, choose and prepare a recipe with their group, and we celebrated by sharing the results and voting their favorite.

In every grade, understanding the ‘genre’ recipe was key and, right next to safety and hygiene, it took the center of the stage often at the beginning of each class. I insist that students read the whole recipe from beginning to end before engaging in the cooking. Besides practicing reading, this habit prevents cooks from starting a recipe and having to run out of the house mid-cooking to buy some ingredient they are short of. Also, it gives the chance to clarify doubts before reaching the point of not knowing what to do with that yeast that is not ‘foaming’.

The role of recipes in my classes

Working with all levels of students, and different levels of readers, I learned to differentiate language as well as layout of the recipes I offered them. After researching a lot, I realized cookbooks written for children are actually written for adults to cook with children, or for very literate children.

Since the kind of cooking I wanted to offer was not the ‘kid friendly let’s decorate a box cake with candy’ kind, but rather the ‘let’s learn something healthy and culturally worthy’ kind, I needed reading to be a tool rather than a challenge.

I began using the internet to find images, and often times I drew my own pictures – especially the ones referring to actions – using the very limited drawing programs available to me at the time. I added the pictures to the recipes and left the instructions or ingredients list as subtitles to my beginning readers, and used fewer illustrations as the age and the reading ability advanced.

Now about the book

I am not precisely sure of when I became passionate about the process of learning to read and write. Books were dear friends in my adolescence, but I remember always having books around as a younger child. I remember being read to, and enjoying pictures of specific books. Despite that, not everyone who has good personal experiences with reading and writing becomes an advocate for literacy.

Maybe my ability to speak different languages and my firm notion that the language we speak is directly related to the way we experience the world and build our thoughts also plays an important part in my strong feelings about the importance of fostering literacy from a young age.

More than any of the above – or more as a consequence of both – I believe that the ability to produce and to decipher print, as well as the recognition of its uses and its value, brings enormous freedom and autonomy, which are the core of my teaching philosophy. I chose to be a teacher to help children become lords of themselves, directors of their own scenes, chefs of their own kitchens.

One of the ways I can do that indirectly – meaning, not being in the classroom with each and every child – is by writing a book that will allow them to practice autonomy, mathematics, science, and early literacy skills while they prepare their own food from scratch. Not from a box.

- more to come later about the book -

I started thinking about the garden again. Beds are being dug, weeds are being pulled out, seeds are being sown. One of the beauties of living in a temperate zone is the very evident difference among seasons. The yearly death of trees, flowers, and bushes saddens me as much as their rebirth fills my heart with joy. The first sprouts in March never fail to put a smile on my face, and each year I decide I will find time and energy to be a good gardener.

This year the new season brings something else that is new: a professional life for me. Now, for the first time since I moved to Portland, I will be a ‘grown up’. No longer on a visa, no longer a student.

Growing up has its advantages and its shortcomings. With the freedom to work and make a living comes the responsibility to work and make a living. I have always been one to believe that work and fun must be synonyms for a fulfilling life. That is still my philosophy, but some ideas need revision. As with other matters, when weighing pros and cons, compromising proves to be key.

Yesterday I spent the day at the child center where I was working four months ago, a job I needed to leave to student teach in public schools as a requirement for the Master of Arts in Teaching program I am about to graduate from. My heart filled with the joy of being around the children, around MY students again, and I feel excited to be part of their lives for another four months until they graduate preschool. Work, just as relationships of any kind, always brings challenges, but the gains of sharing their joy as they find their way, their words, and their interests, surpasses little annoyances.

As I sat on the carpet to read to them or to listen to their tales, it felt as if the four months I have been away on my ‘sabbatical’ had not passed. I was really surprised, because four months in their lives is a long time; four months to a four year old child is equivalent to three years to a thirty seven year old adult – about one tenth of their life.

However, the enchantment of working with such young people and to be part of their first learnings is much more rewarding than the effective salary paid for that important job, which is saddening. No matter how I feel about financial compensation, at the end of the day it does matter. It allows me to hire someone to weed my garden so I can grow the flowers I want to beautify my home, it allows me to offer myself and my husband more than the basics when it comes to food and material possessions, it allows me to send gifts to my loved ones in Brasil and to visit them. And it allows me to do a better job at work because my personal life is fulfilled, I am rested and pleased, and I have mental space to increment the basic requirements with love and creativity. When I write about compromise, then, I refer to teaching grade school because I need to earn more to earn a better living – thus allowing me to teach better.

To think about being a grade school teacher, on the other hand, is to give it a chance to surprise me, to give those children the opportunity to share with me their hopes of learning and experimenting, just as Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince allows the weeds to grow enough to decide whether they will bring joy or hardship before deciding whether to care for them with all his will or to yank them from the ground.

Surprised already, I realize grade school expands the preschool teaching of life skills. It brings along the opportunity to work with reading and writing like I never did before, deeply supporting these young learners to independently make sense of the world around them. The more I give room in my heart for teaching the not-so-young children in Kindergarten and first grade, the fonder I grow of this idea and the possibilities around it.

Even as I begin to see myself as a grade school teacher, though, my core belief is still grounded in Early Childhood Education: work and pleasure go hand in hand, an idea unfortunately very disconnected from formal schooling. By pleasure, however, I do not mean idle fun, empty laughter. I mean deep joy of personal realization, of students learning they can: they can read, they can count, they can understand causes and consequences, they can document their learning to help understand it better and to share it with the world.

The key in this perspective is to permit and support children to figure out their own questions, to help them organize their thoughts, and to propose the tools for them to find answers. I trust that when children have a say in their learning, when their interests guide the teacher, the chores become challenges they actually want to surpass, and education earns the purpose it should have in the first place: to allow each one of us to conquer goals we set ourselves to.

With a lighter heart I come to the conclusion that when the focus is self realization – through Reading, Math, Gardening or College, the age of the learner matters very little. We are – and should be – forever overcoming obstacles and adding layers to our body of knowledge, and we all can use help seeing beyond our boundaries if we wish to one day get to the other side. To help others keep moving, in my opinion, is the job of a good teacher.

“If we wanted to make learning to read and to write as difficult as possible, fragmenting language learning into several unrelated lessons each day would be a good way to do it.”

During my studies to become a psychologist I used to hear a lot that ‘I am my own instrument’, meaning that our mind and our body are the tools we use in the practice. I have transferred that understanding with me when I became a teacher, and I have always seen myself as a whole person when teaching. Nevertheless, there are some aspects of my life I have explored very little, but which are actually important influences on the way I think and act as a person as well as a professional.

the political aspect

For years I have been saying ‘I do not understand nor do I care about politics’, and that worked just fine until now. I recently began to actually look at my hesitation and try to elaborate on the reasons, the background, the contingencies which might have led me to think and feel uninterested or discouraged, and its meaning today in my actions and reflections as a teacher. In the United States I hear often about the importance of advocating for Early Childhood, and I worried because the idea of getting involved in politics has always given me the creeps. However, during a class in the MAT program at George Fox, I suddenly understood what it actually meant to be a politicized teacher, I realized I agree with this idea, and I notice now that everything related to education that I experience, read or hear falls into place differently because of that insight. My image of a teacher is changing – and so is my professional identity!

sexual identification

When I started to reflect on how I became this girlie girl who loves pink if my mother is a classic woman who does not care for any make up other than lipstick, and who wears mostly black, white and jeans, I realized I looked elsewhere for a model that I could relate to. I do not know for sure how these connections happen, but I do remember being highly intrigued with the discussion ‘nature x nurture’ in my college years. That haziness came back, as did the restlessness of something insanely fascinating. I began to ponder where our character comes from, since I was not that close to my grandmother, and I still looked at her for modeling – meaning I kind of had it IN ME and looked around me to find my identification. This is one of those fundamental ideas that apparently does not affect teaching, but if we look closely it makes all the difference in how the teacher perceives the student as a human being: is the student someone who repeats family and cultural patterns, or is the student a human being who makes his own choices and who looks for stimuli that resound with his/her own music? This is definitely an area I will always look to explore in discussions with others, as well as in readings.

excitement of questioning

More than answers, I think once again studying is bringing me questions and the excitement of exchanging ideas with others. This is what I believe thinking critically means: being always open to rediscover, to review and to turn ideas around according to new lights shed over old paradigms.

Like a graffiti I once saw stated:

“Our head is round to allow thought to change direction”.

I recently read two articles that brought an important point to my attention: although emergent curriculum is respectful to children’s personal learning processes, knowledge-based curriculum can and should be used to support the development of life and thinking skills we aim at in our schools. Being connected and informed makes a world of difference in a teacher’s choice of culturally meaningful facts that are worth studying in the proportion that the children can generalize and relate them to multiple situations.

If as a teacher I simply do away with the teaching of facts or with the teacher-chosen books, I rob my students from the chance to get to access really cool, important, enriching knowledge.

While I read the texts I began to question my own actions and daily thoughts that concern making life easier. The fact that education for a long time was massively knowledge-centered created almost a reactive movement of banishing knowledge altogether. When I first got in contact with the child-centered approach, I was infatuated with it, so different from my experience as a student, and so considerate with the learner’s needs and desires. Recently, however, I have been clearing up the air around me and managing to bring ideas together to formulate what I see as a balance. I came to realize we do not always need to reject one philosophy to embrace the other: my ideal education now is about both/and rather than either/or – in all aspects.

Although sometimes I am convinced there is no need to go about things the hard way, I suspect that taking the easy way dumbs us (and our students), after all, the brain is a muscle that needs exercise to keep fit.

This week I heard that ‘dodge ball’ was banished from schools because kids got hurt. How many times does a soccer player get hurt before he makes it to the world cup? The old ‘no pain no gain’ idea makes sense in sports as well as in language and in learning to a broader sense.

I often hear American Kindergarten teachers say that English is a complex, difficult language full of exceptions. Well… I have noticed that EVERY language has its difficulties and exceptions, and still people learn them. Instead of not teaching grammar because it is difficult, and instead of getting rid of the accents (in Portuguese, French or Spanish) because they make language complicated, our role as teachers is to help our students develop the tools to deal with these challenges. The languages I know that derive from Latin would be a lot less rich with fewer variations, and so would English.

Good writers are so because they explore language. We must allow our students the same advantage by giving them material to expand their repertoire.

References:
Manzo, K.K. (2008). Learning Essentials. Educatio Week. Vol 27, No. 39. (May, 2008) pp. 1-4
Hirsch, Jr., E.D., (2008) Plugging the Hole in State Standards. American Educator (Spring, 2008) pp. 8-12.

I find it interesting how some people who are truly concerned with multicultural education and overall human acceptance of the fellow human sometimes aiming to make a point of broadening the perspective dismiss as superficial the food of a people.

Although we cannot fully understand the complexities of a culture by simply preparing and eating its staples, they are a great source of information if we are willing to explore. The reasons behind each item, the influence the weather has on what is produced or not in a determined region, what is considered sacred, what is considered profane, what is eaten every day and what is reserved for special occasions, how things turned out to be prepared the way they are and what they are called, all these aspects of what we eat in each nook of the world may not determine the people’s character, but are very likely determined by the same factors. Dry weather, dry food, dry people. Hot weather, hot food, hot people. Not always straight forward like that, but connections can often be made. Isn’t it interesting that most middle eastern cultures use bulghur wheat, lamb, mint, yoghurt…? The list could go on. In South America, for some reason, beans are favored, along with beef and vegetables. Different seasonings mark the variations in countries or regions, but we can almost certainly count on beans.

I see an undeniable connection between food, geography, and culture, and I firmly believe it is perfectly plausible to begin diving deep into the most intricate aspects of diversity beginning with the eating habits and traditions – as long as we keep in mind that these are the path to understanding, not all of the culture in itself.

Yesterday in my lunch duty at the school where I volunteer I seemed to be out to get untied shoelaces; and they seemed to be testing me as well. When I approach students older than Kindergarteners, I usually ask them: “Can you tie your shoelaces or would you like me to tie them for you?” Children usually prefer to do it themselves, as I have noticed.

This one boy, however, told me: “I am fine”, to which I replied: “You are not safe. Would you like me to tie for you?” “Fine” , he responded. Then, as I tied his shoes he leaned over and whispered: “I am so embarrassed. I don’t know how to tie my shoes. Please don’t tell anyone.”

I was really surprised with his revelation to me, after all I am a volunteer who is there only during his lunch, and only twice a week. Nevertheless, I assured him I would not tell anyone, and I offered: “If you ever want to learn, we can go to a quiet area here in the school and I can teach you.” “Meanwhile, if it gets untied again you can tuck the lace on the side of your foot just so you don’t trip on it”. He smiled as he walked to recess “Thank you”. It was not clear to me whether he was thanking me for tieing his shoes, for keeping his secret, or for offering to teach him.

Today I saw him arrive at the cafeteria, and one of his shoes was untied. I walked over to him and disguised as well as I could: “Hey, I am trying this new way of tieing shoes, but I do not have laces today. Can I practice on your sneakers?” He said “sure”, and so I tied. I couldn’t help but notice that one of the sides of his lace was tucked into the shoe. That made me smile and remember the offer I had made.

As I watched lunch, I spoke with my Principal and explained to her what had happened and my intention to help that boy. She told me he could not go on being embarrassed, and that the one thing to do was to learn. She walked to him and quietly spoke with him. He looked a little self conscious as he held his cheeks for a few minutes after she left him. His classmate kept talking to him, so he went back to being one of the boys having lunch.

When he was done, the Principal walked him to me and said: “You two can go now. This is very special”. And she opened a room where we would not be bothered.

We worked on tieing his shoes over and over again, he experimented different ways of doing it. First I demonstrated and ‘narrated’ each step, then we did it at the same time, each one of us with one of his shoes, then I held his shoe in front of him while he tried several times, until he finally did it without my intervention or even my guidance. He did it all by himself. His eyes smiled, and he looked at me. I felt tears in my eyes, and I tried hard to hold them back, but I told him I was really moved about his achievement, and that I was very happy for the independence he would have from that moment on. He thanked me again, and then he untied one of his shoes. As he walked out to recess he said: “I will tie it out there”.

Moments like this reinforce my engrained idea that the paycheck to me, however necessary for living, feels like a bonus.