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 -

Quinta feira passada minha mãe lançou seu primeiro romance, “maria” – escrito assim, em letras minúsculas. A letra minúscula no início de um nome próprio na capa de seu livro é apenas mais uma das peculiaridades de minha mãe, que costumam fascinar a maior parte das pessoas que a conhecem, gostem dela ou nao.

A estória que ela conta em “maria” ganha vida com essas peculiaridades. Por vezes eu sinto meu rosto corar frente a sua honestidade em compartilhar sua complexa humanindade, e penso que eu jamais teria a audácia de exibir minhas falhas em publico como ela. Os defeitos expostos, porém, são libertadores quando associados a uma mulher admirável, suficientemente corajosa para acreditar em si e defender suas convicções.

Além dos insights sobre si, “maria” vividamente detalha características de outros, e costura sentidos invocando-me a cada cena, enriquecendo a história e impondo às minhas percepcoes a realidade dos eventos descritos. Eu vejo, sinto, cheiro e ouço o que a protagonista vive. Como consequência, em vez da empatia que costumo sentir como leitora, meu corpo reage a “maria” com emoções reais em primeira mão.

Seu talento desperta minha sensibilidade para observar a vida à minha volta: aparências adquirem cheiros, emoções ganham cor, sons recebem imagem. Toda essa intensidade é transferida para meu mundo, conectando o real e o fantástico e alimentando minha própria imaginação com o desejo de digerir a vida através das palavras.

Last Thursday my mother launched her first novel, “maria” – written like that, with lower case. The font size beginning a proper name on the cover of her book is just another of my mother’s peculiarities, which usually fascinate most people who know her, whether they like her or not.

The story she tells in “maria” comes to life with those peculiarities. At times I blush at her honesty in sharing her complex humanity, thinking I would never have the courage to exhibit my flaws in public like that. Most of the lines, however, liberate me as they portray an admirable woman, courageous enough to assume herself and to stand for her beliefs.

Besides the insights on herself, “maria” vividly details characteristics of other humans and ties senses together when bringing me to a scene, enriching the story and forcing the reality of each event described into my perceptions: I see, I feel, I smell and I hear what the protagonist lives. As a consequence, my body reacts with true first hand emotions, rather than empathetic ones.

Her talent wakes up my sensibility to observe life around me. Appearances acquire smells, emotions become tinted, sounds gain image. All that intensity is transferred to my world, bridging the real-outside-world and the fantastic-inside-world and feeding my own imagination with the desire to digest life through words.

Living in the United States, race, color and ethnicity became subjects of reflection like never before in my life. These are matters of great importance in the humanistic fields like education and psychology, and what calls my attention is that these aspects are discussed, analyzed and studied almost detached from the whole of the person “carrying” them, rather than as part of a complex individual.

According to Wikipedia, “multiratial Brazilians make up 42% of Brazil’s population”, which is to say that almost half the population of my country consists of mixed race people. Although the actual number is new to me, my observation pointed towards something like that, and I have taken pride in this perception since the first time I got in contact with the schizoid way race is perceived in the United States. More recently, however, I have realized that the separation has its advantages, and the main one I see is the attachment each people has to their own culture, keeping in contact with their origins, their mother language, their customs and traditions. In one word: roots. I come from Arabs, Amerindian and Portuguese on one side and Lebanese and Portuguese on the other. I love having this rich ancestry, but I know very little of the history and the geography of my family. I wonder if this obliviousness was purposeful on the part of the miscegenating couples to avoid cultural shock.

About ten years ago my sister befriended a group of Arab girls in Sao Paulo whose families kept their breed almost pure. I do not think it was a coincidence that these girls could speak at least a few words of Arabic and knew their ancestors’ history. I became envious of them, I wished I knew more about mine, and I asked my relatives for information. Although I was told about our origins, I can only remember some fragments. I do not know the name of the city my great-grandfather came from – or was it my great-great-grandfather? I can barely pronounce his original name – the one he had before he changed it to be more understandable for the Brazilians – and I do not know any words in Arabic. I know absolutely nothing about my Amerindian ascendence, nor about the Portuguese one.

The other day a friend shared the story of an acquaintance who had been adopted. As we often hear happens with adoptive children, this person my friend knew became uneasy with the unknown and would not rest until she found her birth mother. After she met her, she gladly rejoined her adoptive one and dropped the matter.

I feel a little like the adoptive child, who seeks the lost mother  and decides she can be dismissed once they meet. However I still feel the emptiness, the need to belong like these “pure breed” people do. I wonder if other multiracial individuals feel the same, if what happens to me is as common as what happens with adoptive children. That does not solve my personal restlessness, but it would be quite interesting to find out.

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.