Classroom Activities Part III: Cooking

Cooking is one of those topic areas we often forget about. There is a lot of unique vocabulary that deals with the kitchen, so teaching anything related to cooking begins with an extensive review of new words.

As I’ve told you before, I’m very limited in my resources as a teacher. Most Malagasy teachers have access to printing for some of their classes. For them, it’s a bit easier because they have only so many classes. I, however, have 19 classes and nearly 700 students. A normal teacher can justify printing about 100-150 pages of handouts each week. I can’t really justify or pay for 700 handouts every time I want to teach new vocabulary. Thus, my solution was to use the only tool I have in the classroom, the blackboard.

The cooking lesson begins relatively easy. I ask my students what they’re favorite foods are. It’s a general question I ask the class, and there are usually a dozen or so answers the slowly find their way from my students’ brains to their mouths after some careful (or direct) prodding on my part. The typical answers always included fish, rice (big surprise there), ravitoto (a Malagasy dish), tacos, pizza, mofo gasy (like a little donut hole but fluffier), and chicken (ahoko-gasy which is a muscular Malagasy chicken). Once we get these out there, I explain that we’re going to talk about the kitchen and some terms we use for cooking.

Already on the blackboard I have so elegantly (please pick up on the sarcasm) drawn a place setting with a fork, spoon, knife, plate, and cup. There is a whisk, a ladle, a peeler, a bowl, a cutting board, and a strainer. There’s also a frying pan, a baking pan, a pot, a pot of boiling water, a sink, and an oven. Nearby, there is a vertical list of various verbs which include: cut, slice, chop, mix, pour, measure, add, stir, and fill. We run through all the nouns first before I have the students stand up and follow my actions as I act out the various verbs. I say the line and act before they repeat the sentence and the action.

It could look something like this;

“I measure the flour.”

“I add the flour in the bowl.”

“I measure the sugar and add it in the bowl.”

“I measure the milk and pour it into the bowl.”

“I take the whisk and mix the ingredients in the bowl.”

“I pour the mixture into the baking pan. I open the oven and put the baking pan in the oven. I close the oven and wait.”

“I put on the oven mitts”

“I open the oven and take out the baking pan. I close the oven.”

(Here I chose to comically shut the oven door with my foot while pretending to hold a hot baking pan. Humor helps people remember things because it causes an affective [emotional] memory associated with the word or thing being learned. It works in the reverse as well. A bad emotional experience learning something will make us always associate that thing with a negative memory. In fact, that negative memory is almost always stronger than a positive memory which coincidentally coincides with the behavioral economic principle of disutility such that people hate losing more than they like winning. In other words, people hate negative memories more than they like positive memories. Isn’t that fascinating?)

“I put the cake on the cutting board.”

At this point I ask my students what we do next.

“Do I PEEL the cake?” (There is a chorus of no’s.)

“Do I MIX the cake?” (The same response.)

“Do I CHOP the cake?”

I get a mix of yeses and no’s, so I inquire again demonstrating what chop means at which point the students laugh and answer correctly with either cut or slice.

After the whole theatrical and pretty darn inaccurate way of actually baking a cake, I have my students get into groups of three and write their own recipes of whatever they like. The variety of things was decent enough. Cake, rice and meat, fried fish, pizza, tacos, fruit salad. I was generally impressed.

While they did this in their groups, I circled around and helped with corrections or answered questions. A common mistake deals with prepositions. They like to say, “in the stove,” as opposed to, “on the stove”. Or they would say, “on the bowl,” instead of, “in the bowl”. To help them better understand why one preposition is better than the other, I explain that if you try to but something in the stove instead of on the stove, it implies that you’re trying to force something inside the stovetop. It is similar with on the bowl instead of in the bowl. If you say, “on the bowl,” you’re implying that the item is resting on top of the bowl and is not actually in the bowl. Explaining what trying to put something IN a stovetop or plate was entertaining for them as I physically demonstrated what it would look like (which is absolutely ridiculous as I pretended to force a frying pan INSIDE a stovetop).

Another common error is “a sugar” or “a salt”. To help with this, I explain that if they say “a” with items like these, they’re implying that they’re only adding a single little grain. This was not as entertaining as trying to demonstrate forcing a pan into a stovetop as opposed to putting it on top, but watching them realize that measuring “a flour” implies a single grain of flour was rather entertaining for me.

The cooking lesson is always interesting because food is a universal language in itself. Every culture has some type of traditional food. And with increasing globalization and cross-cultural exchange, some foods, such as pizza, are truly universal, even though some countries do it much better than others. I’d kill for some American pizza. Anyways, that’s another example of one of my lessons. More to come in the impending weeks. As always, know that you are in my prayers each morning. All I ask is that you do the same for me.

May God be praised.