"I get to use a knife!"
We had a kitchen last summer at camp. We’d always fantasized about doing cooking and gardening projects with kids – Camp Kaleidoscope and Parts and Crafts were both started by groups of people who’d spent years living in undergraduate student cooperatives where the pragmatic and symbolic values of cooking for each other and eating with each other are both taken really seriously. We were early adopters of the presently-hip food politics – local foods, sustainability, connection with land, food, and process. When I fantasize about there being a full-time educational project (a “school”, if you will), based around our principles, I imagine kids cooking lunch for each other and eating together in small groups, and I imagine kids running a cafe, next door, cooking for neighbors and strangers, making entrepreuneurial decisions, and enjoying all of the awesomeness of working in a commercial/restaurant kitchen.
Stevo was at camp for most of the summer, and he, among many many other talents, knows a lot about food, and food-processes. Part of the point of Parts and Crafts is to create environments where adults can share their enthusiasms with kids, freely and without the weird deformations of hierarchy and judgement. We made it unofficial policy to do a cooking activity with kids every day – usually something simple and satisfying with a little bit of interesting kitchen chemistry involved.
I spent a little bit of time earlier this fall teaching a series of workshops on computer programming for students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. I held the first couple of workshops in the school’s computer lab, with all of the students in front of computers, following along, hopefully typing along, watching me type code and talk through the process of doing so. These sessions were long, and, to a large degree, pretty effective, I think, but I found them really confusing. I’m standing up there looking out at all of these strangely lit faces that I can’t quite see, unable to see screens, unable to see how people are doing or whether they’re getting it. I was reminded of the experience of being in the audience at an electronic music show where the performer is doing all of his stuff on his laptop – “what’s going on? is he checking his email? playing tetris? updating his facebook status?”
During these workshops we never finished everything that I wanted to finish – the tutorial sessions were scheduled to last for four hours, which is, in my opinion, way too long for any human to listen to another human, and probably too long to stare at the computer screen uninterruptedly. Folks got bored. At some point I would start to sense this, and I would ask them – “I have a few more topics that I think it would be useful to cover. I think it would be useful to go through the bouncing balls example and figure out a good way to make the balls bounce off of each other. We’d go through a couple of the big abstractions of programming, in doing so. But I can also just go around and chat with people about what they understand and what they don’t understand and talk about projects. What do you think?” And no one would say anything. “Well, I’m trying to figure out what’s useful to do. Would it be helpful for me to chat with any of you one-on-one?” And no one would say anything. “Do you want to try to work through this next project together?” And no one would say anything. And eventually I’d make some decision, tell everyone that they could leave if they wanted, and go on.
My gut instinct here was to blame years and years of hierarchical education for rendering these otherwise intelligent and articulate and independent people mute and passive. I remembered a talk that I went to with some parents and young kids from the student-run Blue Mountain School in Oregon. The talk was about video-games and learning. It was really boring. It was really boring and was clearly given by a guy who didn’t play video games for an audience of people who didn’t play video games. I sat and made quiet snide comments to my friend who came with me. The kids got up, wandered around the auditorium, found the food that was going to be served at the post-talk reception, ate crackers and cheese, and went outside to play.
The hardest thing for me about teaching grad students was that they didn’t provide me with the immediate feedback that elementary and middle school students do. Were they bored? Did they care? Was I explaining the stuff that they were interested in? I couldn’t tell.
Last summer, though, Stevo and I were working with a group of young kids who seemed basically happy to to work on pretty much everything we offered them to do, but who were, like the Harvard grad students, really passive about letting us know when they weren’t interested. One day the activities that we were presenting started to totally peter out – I don’t remember exactly what they were, but I remember that at some point I found myself sitting with kids and explaining something and suddenly realizing that they weren’t listening, that they didn’t care, and that I didn’t actually care all that much either. “Stevo!” I said, “Wanna make pickles?”
This is pretty much my panic-response to any confusing situation – to try to hand it off to someone else for a little while to give me some time to think about it myself. This is incredibly useful, and I think that it’s really a pity that most teachers don’t have the luxury of a teaching partner. I say ‘luxury’, just because teaching partners are rare in traditional education, but, for me, they are practically a necessity.
Stevo wanted to make pickles. I’m pretty sure that Stevo always wants to make pickles. When he first came to Boston to work with us he was moving back and forth between staying with different friends of ours, and I could tell where he was inhabiting at any given moment by the number and variety of mason jars covered in bandannas happily bubbling away with wild yeasts. I asked the kids if they wanted to make pickles in my most enthusastic tone of voice in an attempt to carry them along into the project, and everyone headed off into the kitchen.
Stevo started explaining the process of pickling, talking about vinegar and wild yeasts and fermentation and brine and bacteria as he gathered up materials and ingredients. We didn’t quite have enoughcounter-space in the kitchen for everyone to be working, and I noticed one kid whose attention wandered in and out of the activity (and whose body wandered around the room). He wanted to be working on a project with us, but he wasn’t actually satisfied and engaged with the project we were working on.
I grabbed a cutting board and a few cucumbers and a serrated knife and asked him whether he wanted to help me cut. He looked at me, suddenly attentive. “Really? I get to use a knife? Isn’t that dangerous?”
So we had a little conversation about what made knives dangerous and whether he could use one without cutting himself. He decided that he probably could if he made sure that he was holding far side of the cucumber from where he was cutting. I sat with him for a little while, making sure that he was handling the knife sensibly, and I watched him experiment with different ways of cutting. First he just tried pushing really hard on the cucumber, and then he tried sawing through it. It took him a little while to get the hang of the process. Between each cucumber he looked up at me, smiling, and said “I get to use a knife!” and I told him that we needed to cut the cucumbers somehow and it definitely seemed to me like the best tool for the job.
I had forgotten that knife-usage is a real skill, and that knives, even little serrated steak knives, are real tools that you have to learn to handle. This is a ridiculous thing for me to have forgotten – I remember pretty vividly the first time I ever helped to cook dinner at the student cooperative. The “big cook” laughed at me when I started chopping the onions. I felt dumb and stupid and young. I’d never cooked before. I think of myself as a pretty good cook now, and most people that I cook for seem to agree. One of the reasons that I never learned to cook at my parent’s house was because we didn’t have any good knives, so chopping onions and garlic there was a long and frustrating process. I still don’t like to cook when I’m visiting them. I’ve gotten to be a good cook because I’ve practiced a lot, and I’ve practiced a lot because I think the process is fun, and I think the process is fun because I know how and when to use the tools effectively.
This is true of kitchen knives, it’s true of the soldering iron, it’s true of the simple process of twisting wires around each other to make relatively stable temporary electrical connections. I didn’t really need to give any instruction to our camper about how to use the knife, and beyond a brief explanation of the theories (such as they are) of soldering, or wire-twisting, there’s not a whole lot of useful instruction I can give on those tools either. The objects themselves contain the explanation of how to work them, and the knowledge slowly reveals itself through repeated thoughtful and purposeful use.