Spiraling
Sometimes, it feels like the proverbial 1 step forward, 2 steps back.
For all that I try to lift my students up, to expand their vocabulary, to give them new experiences, to teach them skills that are lacking in their homes and lives, sometimes things seem so appalling that I have trouble processing it.
It is the little things that show it the most.
I am tryng to teach them to eat healthy, in an era and in a poor area where probably both parents work, and it is hard to have the energy to get any food on the table. Where cooking is taking the frozen lasagna out of the carton and into the stove, with a salad on the side if they are really trying to eat healthy. Very few have the energy and knowledge to teach their children to cook - if they do anything more than microwave some things.
First I had to accept that few people keep canisters of sugar and flour in the kitchen anymore, so I had to explain this to students (having just one center cannister to hold flour only means four over the floor and everywhere). Last year it finally got into my head that it is a growing percentage that do not know flour from sugar from salt, unless they tasted it. They haven't seen flour. Sugar is (more and more) just one of the sweeteners in the packages. I have to teach this.
Because of some birthdays coming up in a row in one class, I agree that Birthday Cake was in order, we could make it, but because of the lack of time in the class as well as what I call 'distribution problems', we would make cupcakes. This led to some protests, and the discussion that followed brought out that some students did not understand that cupcakes are cake just cooked in a smaller container. They truly did not understand that it is the same cake batter that you can just put into different containers. I had to squash other students for calling them total idiots.
What kind of homes and family life do they have, if no one has made cake and cupcakes with them?
For all that I try to lift my students up, to expand their vocabulary, to give them new experiences, to teach them skills that are lacking in their homes and lives, sometimes things seem so appalling that I have trouble processing it.
It is the little things that show it the most.
I am tryng to teach them to eat healthy, in an era and in a poor area where probably both parents work, and it is hard to have the energy to get any food on the table. Where cooking is taking the frozen lasagna out of the carton and into the stove, with a salad on the side if they are really trying to eat healthy. Very few have the energy and knowledge to teach their children to cook - if they do anything more than microwave some things.
First I had to accept that few people keep canisters of sugar and flour in the kitchen anymore, so I had to explain this to students (having just one center cannister to hold flour only means four over the floor and everywhere). Last year it finally got into my head that it is a growing percentage that do not know flour from sugar from salt, unless they tasted it. They haven't seen flour. Sugar is (more and more) just one of the sweeteners in the packages. I have to teach this.
Because of some birthdays coming up in a row in one class, I agree that Birthday Cake was in order, we could make it, but because of the lack of time in the class as well as what I call 'distribution problems', we would make cupcakes. This led to some protests, and the discussion that followed brought out that some students did not understand that cupcakes are cake just cooked in a smaller container. They truly did not understand that it is the same cake batter that you can just put into different containers. I had to squash other students for calling them total idiots.
What kind of homes and family life do they have, if no one has made cake and cupcakes with them?