by Alison Double
Back in our family’s day, most parents co-oped at Open Classroom; I was one of the parents lucky enough to spend a lot of time volunteering in the program. Just to give you an idea of timing, in those days, we still used paper Scrip*, sold from a picnic table at drop-off time.
When Emily was in Laurie Riley’s kindergarten class, our family became serious about making sushi so, when Emily asked me to do a sushi-making project at school, it seemed like a reasonable idea. Armed with dried nori sheets, extra rolling mats, pre-cooked sushi rice, several different ingredients for preparing fillings and a small tin of wasabi powder, I arrived at school and manically scrubbed the big wooden table. The students prepared the veggies, learned how to spread the rice on the seaweed, placed their chosen fillings on the rice and rolled up their sushi, then took great pride in walking around handing out the delicious results of their work.
Shortly before I left, when the classroom floor was covered in a thin layer of ground-in sushi rice and I had to peel my feet from it with every step I took, I heard peals of laughter, as a group of students walked over to Laurie and offered her the platter. She took a bite and the giggling took a new turn as Laurie’s face went slightly red, while she gamely chewed on the piece of sushi she had taken. The tricksters had spread a thick layer of wasabi on the bottom of it! Luckily, Laurie was no stranger to spicy food (or tricksters) and from the twinkle in her eye I could tell she was more amused than harmed.
Marlene was a huge supporter of cooking projects, regularly making zucchini bread, cinnamon twists and other goodies with the kids in her class, and Larry also believed in the value of making and eating food together. I’ll always remember how the students proved him wrong when I helped them make Thai pumpkin soup around Hallowe’en. “They’ll never eat that,” he said. Our survey showed that more than 70% of them liked or loved it!
But it was as a co-oper in Amy’s class that I really earned my chops. Amy had high expectations and assigned projects accordingly! On one memorable occasion I turned up to work in Amy’s classroom and she said something like, “OK, I need you to make the cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches with the kids for the Holiday Café,” when what really happened was more like, “You’re in charge of making hundreds of… [aforementioned sandwiches] and you’ll need to find and wash all the equipment, wrangle the students and clean up afterwards. Expect to be here for 4 or 5 hours.” To be fair, the throw-’em-in-the-deep-end approach communicated Amy’s complete confidence in your abilities. At times, it could leave you feeling as if you were sinking, but most often you ended up swimming and in the process developing a lot of flexibility and drawing on humor and patience to get things done. It was all worth it for the sigh of relief and sense of achievement once the dishes were washed, the tables cleaned up and you walked out the door! Amy loved the cooking projects and really got me established in the role of Cooking Mom.
That’s how I ended up becoming type-cast. I stuck with it over the years because almost from the start I could see how cooking and baking projects gave some students a chance to shine when other more ‘academic’ subjects were hard for them. Cooking taught students measuring, knife and decorating skills, patience and teamwork, empowered them and gave them pride in the reactions of their peers when sharing their results. They learned how to make delicious food with produce from the garden and developed a greater connection with their senses. The best-kept secret of all was that the Cooking Mom learned just as much from these projects as the students.
*For our younger readers: Scrip is the fund raising thing where parents have a card they give to Good Earth and United Market and the stores give the school a percentage of whatever the card holder spends. In ye olden days, Scrip used to be like Monopoly money, which you had to buy up front and use to purchase your groceries!