Try and Try Again

Teen Chef

If you have teenagers, you know that one of the most important meals of their day is lunner. It’s the meal between lunch and dinner and takes place after school and as soon as they walk in the door. It usually follows two things: opening the refrigerator and/or pantry, and the question “what’s for dinner?” I was certainly no different when I was in high school,  and my list of possible items to eat included Swansons Turkey Pot Pie, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, Betty Crocker Fudge Brownies, or, in desperation, toast. Clearly I had absolutely no concern for my health and feeding myself overly-processed foods was not at the top of my list of concerns. Mainly, I got bored of my limited culinary repertoire and grew tired of only being able to cook food that came out of a box or fit into a toaster.

When senior year came, early dismissal from school came along with it. Suddenly I had much more time to futz around the kitchen and get more creative with my meals. I started paying attention to the recipes in my Seventeen magazine and came across one for a fluffy cheese omelette. I had always enjoyed scrambled eggs, and the idea of stepping up my skills and taking on the challenge of a perfectly-folded, golden, cheesy egg dish was a perfect way to start. It took many attempts since none of our skillets were non-stick, but I did achieve success, feeling as though I could conquer the world. I began cutting recipes out of any magazine I could find, my own Seventeen magazine each month, Redbook and Ladies Home Journal at the orthodontist office, and I soon had a shoebox of enough clippings to start my own cooking show. Most were not very complicated. There was one for cucumber and cheese sandwiches on toasted bread with the crusts cut off and portioned into little triangles, very British high tea and a complete novelty in my limited life experience. I would write a grocery list of items from my recipes for my mother to pick up on her next trips to the store, and she would happily oblige. As I experimented with different recipes, I became intrigued by various herbs and spices and found dill weed to be one of my favorites. My father still can't stand the taste or smell of it to this day, and any time he caught the slightest whiff of it would growl, "Ugh! You're cooking with that crappy dill weed again!"

I remember that some of the language used in the recipes was confusing. It took many trials and errors to learn that "t" is for teaspoon and "T" is for tablespoon, and that you were supposed to use special measuring utensils, not your regular silverware. "Softened" butter did not mean melted butter and would cause your chocolate chip cookies to come out like one big crepe if you confused the two ideas. There was no internet and no cooking channel, and it would take many years until I would learn the myriad nuances of cooking, the difference between minced and chopped for example, but I honed my skills and found that I had a knack for taking basic recipes and improving on them, or at least making them to my own taste. I would come across dishes at restaurants and recreate them at home: Hobees' breakfast potatoes, their Florentine scramble, and the Cheesecake Factory's chicken Dijon. Over the years my arsenal of recipes has expanded while access to new ones has increased exponentially, and I still get excited to try new ones that I now collect in my digital shoeboxes.

Old Dog-New Tricks

In one of my recent courses, Teaching Digital Writers, I learned about the power of collaborative writing and had the opportunity to try it out in with my regular seniors this past December. I was skeptical, even as I was creating the assignment, that it would be a successful endeavor and was concerned about the effectiveness of it. I kept thinking about how many students dread doing group projects for various reasons, often complaining about one person shouldering the majority of the work or having difficulties compromising and weaker students having to capitulate to the stronger ones.

I had done a few collaborative writing pieces earlier in the year, not digitally, but in class on paper, old-school. One was creative writing circles in which students began writing stories for five-minute cycle, passed the stories around to the next person in the circle, and continued writing for another five-minute cycle, and so on until the story ended up back with the person who started it. This is an assignment students usually enjoy, getting many laughs at seeing where their stories ended up. We also did a collaborative poem in which everybody contributed specific literary elements individually and then put their words together in one piece. This was a new project for me this year and seemed to work well for students, probably because many were uncomfortable writing poetry at first, so doing it as a group was much less daunting.

After attending the Google Apps for Education conference last January, I could see a ton of potential with different collaborative writing environments. We just got Chrome carts this year, and I had the opportunity to incorporate digital collaboration into my classes. I started rethinking the writing assessment for my philosophy unit, specifically with an analysis paragraphs that I would normally have them do at the end of the unit, and I decided to take a leap and have them do it as a collaborative piece. The results were amazing! I gave students the option of doing the paragraph with a partner or alone, and only three students out of 160 opted to work by themselves. I had them working with the Chromebooks in class and rearranged my room to be more conducive to partner work and to enable me to more easily walk around to assist them. I was expecting them to have lots of questions and to be running around, so I made sure to wear comfortable shoes and bring lots of water.

I was absolutely dumbfounded when I found that they hardly needed me at all. It was the complete opposite experience of past writing workshops where students worked on individual pieces. Those days exhaust me, but they are also the days I feel like I actually teach something as I help students craft thesis statements, intros, and analysis chunks. I realized that they didn’t need me as much because they were talking to each other, planning their leads, arguing over which pieces of evidence were stronger, cautioning each other when there was too much summary and not enough analysis, and crafting clever closing statements. The depth of their discussions about the excerpts we had read over the course of the prior six weeks was far greater than any of the seminars we’d had to analyze them. I realized that when they work on pieces by themselves, they tend to only collaborate with me, and with one of me and 30 to 36 of them, things get crazy. I sat at my table in the back of the room, my mouth agape, and watched them, awestruck and excited that the assignment was a success. As I graded them over winter break, I found that I was excited to read them and proud of what they had produced, and having half the work to grade was an added bonus.

Since then we have done two more collaborative pieces.  One was a digital writing piece but more of a collage with each person having their own section of opinion on the topic of what to do with juveniles who commit heinous crimes. The second was a group project in which they put together a persuasive digital piece on a tool or app of their choosing. I have shared these experiences with my department and with the social studies teachers who are my neighbors that I see every day at break and lunch, touting the benefits of collaborative writing and how mind-blowing it is to watch students do it, and several of them have tried it in their classes with the same success.

Sometimes trying something new arises from boredom, and sometimes the impetus is comes from exposure to new information. Either way, it takes a willingness to try and a willingness to fail. When I made that first omelette, I didn’t have much to lose and wasn’t worried about what would happened if I failed. Even though it was burnt on the bottom, I still ate it. I kept working at, and I got better while the omelettes got more edible. When I tried the first collaborative writing assignment, I was worried about failing, but I figured I’d find a way to make it work. Maybe all my little failures in the kitchen, and my subsequent efforts to figure out how to improve, have given me the confidence to try new things elsewhere. I just figure I’ll find a way to make it work, no matter what the task is.