Public Speaking Isn't Just an Assignment Kids!

Anyone who reads this once in a while will notice that the "voice" in this is different, although the stories are familiar. I wrote this narrative as a presentation, and didn't quite find a balance between my writing voice and my presentation voice. It was fun, sharing my Home Ec misadventures with a new audience, however, and we all had a good laugh or two. The next day, my grade 8s made advanced quesadillas (which is regular quesadillas but with onion chopping, and other veggies). It was better than their attempt at Fruit Crumble.

Two years ago, I was teaching grades 6 and 7, when our Home Ec teacher approached me to talk about what Home Ec would look like when we moved into our new school. It would be “healthy living”, and there would be a garden and a dedicated space for recycling, and wouldn’t I like to teach that? We met with our principal and arranged to trade places.

Our New LEED Gold School - to be completed...

Early the next morning, I realized that I had just agreed to teach cooking and sewing to middle schoolers. I would now be in charge of a room full of pre-teens with knives. 

We haven’t moved into our new school yet, so there’s no garden, no recycling, and “healthy living” is disguised as Chocolate Quinoa Cake. I started blogging my Home Ec experience early in the year and realized that amidst the chaos, there was a great deal of learning, and that teaching Home Ec was really fun. 

Halfway through the first year, a grade 8 girl groaned loudly during class and said “Why do we have to learn all this farming stuff? What has this got to do with food?” And I knew had to make the connections more explicit.

I brought in a chicken incubator so that each term could hatch chicks. Only one or two students per class had ever seen chicks hatch. One child told me with complete confidence that “chicken” comes from cows. 

Once those eggs started to wiggle and chirp, the students were engaged. Looking after the chicks was a great springboard for learning about chickens and eggs, discussing factory farms, and talking about sex. How do chicken eggs get fertilized anyway? They thought it was similar to fish egg fertilization. A week after hatching, the chicks go back to the farm. These chickens are pets, not food, and we love them dearly.

My goal is to help my students start to understand the complex systems that bring them foods and textiles. Home Ec is an amazing blend of practical, applied skills and critical thinking. For the most part, though, I debunk urban legends.

 

Vegan Pancakes of Doom

They complained when I introduced a vegan recipe. One girl said she wasn’t allowed to drink soymilk because her dad said it was bad for girls and would stunt her growth. A boy mentioned that boys shouldn’t drink soymilk because it makes them less manly. They know all the bizarre stories about fast food outlets but didn’t know their strawberry fraps are coloured with ground up bugs (cochineal).

Children, meet your drinking water

We learned about Where Does it Come From and Where Does it Go, with a focus on water and waste in the first year, and agriculture in the second.

Using big satellite maps, the students struggled to find their place in the world, or rather, the Metro Vancouver area, placing themselves firmly in Stanley Park, high on a mountaintop, or in south Surrey instead of Port Coquitlam, conveniently located in the centre of the map. When challenged to find the source of their drinking water, many students indicated the ocean. Of 400 students, perhaps only a dozen have visited the Coquitlam watershed, and most of those think that the building is the watershed reservoir, not the lake.

I teach each cohort for 7 – 9 weeks, for 41 minutes a day, and in that term we squeeze in 4 cooking labs, a textiles project and as much food related news as I can. 

Who knew you could MAKE dishcloths? Cool!

Last year in textiles, they all learned to knit. I thought they’d be more tempted to learn if I offered them a “cool” project. Who knew that dishcloths were cool? They made mini dishcloths.

This year, they’re all hand sewing. The grade 6s and 7s are making phone cozies or stuffies and the grade 8s are making aboriginal-inspired buttons banners. The students are willing to try any challenge I throw at them and the results amaze me. Not their kitchen skills, so much, but their creativity, their persistence and their talent for asking me the hard questions and demanding serious answers.

Gingerbread Bunnies - Why Not?

As a middle school home ec teacher, I now teach 400 students a year, all between the ages of 11 and 14. My goal is to encourage them to become informed consumers who ask questions and demand answers about their food, their clothes, and the world in which they live.