So, while I am making tuna fish for our lunch sandwiches one morning, the idea for this post occurred to me. To someone of my generation, home cooking involves simply opening a box and mixing the contents with either water or milk. That, however, was not always the way. Only a generation or two prior, our grandmothers fixed absolutely fabulous meals truly from scratch. In between, people learned to cook by recipes. Great inventions, but something I now believe affected the state of education today.
You see, the recipe was supposed to make it possible for anyone to cook a great meal. One only needed to follow the directions, down to the exact amounts of ingredients to include. Along the way, we came to awe our grandmother's ability to fix meals with no more directions than "a dash of salt" or "a pinch of flour".
So here I am standing in my kitchen making tuna fish for lunch. I'm not saying this to brag, but it was completely without a recipe. I did what I've done many times: mix together the tuna, 2 eggs, "some" mustard and "a little more than some" mayonnaise. If the mixture looked too yellow, I added more mayo. If it was too white, I added a bit more mustard.
That is when it hit me. I was problem solving right there in the kitchen just like I expect my students to learn to do. The era of cooking by recipes and standardized testing (among other things) has ushered in a generation to whom learning is synonymous with memorizing steps. As teachers, we seem to constantly fight to get students to think on their own, but they regularly want to gravitate back to the cookie cutter approach with which they seem to be most comfortable.
I even had a colleague a couple of years back who had a student say, "Don't teach me how to do this problem. Just SHOW me it." Learning to him was memorizing a set of steps to solve a particular problem instead of looking at what was given and creating a solution from what he had available. If the problem changed or was presented in a different manner, then he would have to memorize a completely different set of instructions.
It turns out that my grandmother was one one of the most educated people I would ever encounter, but I never realized it at the time.
As you go about your daily life, look for ways to throw out the recipe. Try something new and creative - especially something that you don't have a recipe for. Sit back and evaluate,or "What would make this better?" or "What is available to me to work with?" Along the way, you just might resurrect the long lost art of problem solving.
