Some Meanderings - From the Popover, to Home School, to Ansel Adams

     My son's love of the kitchen and all its glorious appliances has begun. First, it began with our one dish meal of pesto (I guess it's two if you count the pot for pasta) where we threw everything into the food processor. As mentioned, I did so merely to distract him from his asking for the TV. Also, at 2, he seems pretty capable of standing on a chair and pushing the pulse button. He loved it. Now he walks into the kitchen and points to the food processor on the shelf and says, "Make something!"
 

So, the next day we made play dough. In my own childhood I couldn't stand the smell of store bought play dough. It made me sick. But I remembered my own parents making an odorless homemade version from flour, salt and water (2+ flour, 1/2 cup table salt, 1 cup hot tap water), so Fyo and I mixed a batch in our trusty Cuisinart (perhaps it's appropriate that I don't have a gorgeous new Cuisinart food processor, but the old standby from my own childhood-) like we would any kind of dough, first the dry ingredients then the wet.

He loved it. We turned the dough onto his place mat to knead in more flour to get it the right consistency. He enjoyed playing with it and making circles (a recent love of his), but by far his favorite part was the making and the kneading.

I thought, Glorious! Bread making is next.

Except, yesterday, rather than the lovely Spring like 60 degree weather that we had the day before, we had cold, cloudy weather with gusts of winds up to 60 mph. After a short trip to the morning farmer's market and playground, we (I) resolved to spend the rest of the day inside - not go to the store for yeast and whole wheat flour. So we entertained ourselves by making popovers, which, I discovered, are perfect for the two old attention span. You have a simple ingredient list (flour, milk, egg, dash of butter) to mix, you ladle this thin batter into your muffin tin et voila! You have this perfectly browned piece of magic in your oven. Fyo turned on the oven light, peered in inside and gasped like it was Christmas morning.

I used the recipe from one of my favorite blogs, Notes on Dinner. The title of her popover post is Impress Your Friends - I thought, hell, impress your two year old, or any child really. I remembered loving them as a child but only getting them on rare and unpredictable occasions (odd considering they are in the same family as Dutch Baby pancakes which we had practically every weekend).

At the end of Sarah's post on popovers, she writes she doesn't know the science behind the popover, which is just fine with her. I can totally get this, being one who does not naturally have a scientific mind.

But maybe because I was making with it my two year old, or maybe because I've spent a lot of time researching public education (this seems like a tangent - but I swear it's not) and talking with Husband and each of us concluding that we don't trust the current public schools to give our child an education, or maybe because I'm out researching pre-schools for my son and discovering that while it is only February 20, I have missed the application deadlines for Fall 2011 pre-schools. Not just at one school, but at several. I was told to apply by the end of the month for his Fall 2012 pre-K school year.

No, it's not early admissions at the Ivy League universities; it's pre-school in New York.

This has left Husband and I brainstorming, coming back to that in the beginning we hadn't really planned on sending him to school -well, ever, really. Even before we had a child, my husband talked about wanting to home school. I was more reserved - because you know who would end up doing the home schooling, and while I love the idea of it, I just have lots of other things I want to do with my time. I also want a break. The first year of my son's life we were in LA; I had a great group of similarly minded friends and we talked endlessly about forming our own home school co-op, and just hiring a couple of teachers or taking rotations so we could still get a parenting break. I have heard from a few fellow moms on the playground that some parents in Brooklyn are doing this - getting four or five kids/families together and hiring a couple of teachers to teach their kids pre-school. Just having moved here, I have yet to meet these families.

Then, watching my son in the kitchen and watching him love the process of making something and watching it change through the oven door as it bakes and transforms into something he didn't even know was possible, I found myself taken - inspired even - marveling at his marvel - and wondering precisely about the science behind it. I grew up baking with my parents (cookies and cakes with my mom, bread with my dad) and my mom always just simply said that Chemistry was easy - it's just like baking. She even predicted that I would find Chemistry easy because of all the baking I had done growing up. But in high school, I did not find Chemistry easy. There was no mention of what happens when you mix a cake and forget the salt or the baking soda. It was about atoms and molecules and protons and electrons and neutrons - things I couldn't see. And I am one of those people that if I can't see it I don't know it exists, whether it's a gang of atoms making up the chair I'm sitting on or a sweater I forgot I owned.

So I started wondering about the science of popovers, and I started wondering what if someone had started talking to me about the science from my son's age, would my heinous experience in Chemistry have been different? And I think it would have - because the science of it would have been relevant.

I looked it up. The science behind the popover is actually really interesting. The proteins of the flour (aka the glutens) along with the proteins from the egg form a web that traps the steam from the eggs and milk, consequently, you need high heat to create the ideal environment for steam. You drop the temperature mid-way so it traps the steam where it is, once it's "popped" your popover.

I know. I can't see the glutens or proteins either. But now I find it magical in its own right. Probably because it's relevant.

I struggled a lot in high school, even though I loved reading and writing. In small doses, I didn't even mind math (and oddly have always tested higher on math tests than language tests). As a good friend pointed out, I just wasn't interested. I think his assessment is right. I don't think I was interested because I failed to see how it was all relevant. Even when my dad said I would use math every day of my life, I'd ask in return, "Where? When will knowing the cosign of an angle save me?" (It hasn't yet.)


I found myself coming back to the notion of home school. Some of my favorite former students were home schooled, and by far they were far more prepared - and just more interesting as people - for college than their public schooled counterparts, partly because they were taught to think for themselves and mainly, they were allowed, and encouraged to find their interests and have their entire education wrapped around their interests. The home schooled kids had a sense of self I rarely saw in public schooled kids. So I know home school can be successful. My main concern is I want my time. Currently, I get up at 4am to write while my family sleeps. As some point, I'd like to sleep in knowing I'd have my time to work during the day like other people. And I have read blog posts and articles by moms who do in fact work at home and somehow home school their children. Sometimes people forward me blog posts about how these Wonder Women do it. More often than not, the posts about how they get it done are essentially "Six electronic educational things I dump my kids in front of while I work." No offense to these women and more power to them if this is in fact how their kids learn, but I want my son to enjoy learning, to have fun, to find it interesting, and I want him to learn from interacting with other people.

Baking with my son, researching the science of it, I started wondering, what if "this" could be his school? What if that's all it is? Looking deeper and exploring the world around him and then getting how it all is related and interconnected? And wouldn't that be more interesting than rote memorization? Or being test prepped two months of the year for state standardized tests?

Then this morning, I got up, put off writing for a few minutes by reading Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac and found myself reading about Ansel Adams' education experience. Essentially, he was home schooled/self-taught. He didn't understand how school was relevant either.

I like hearing these kinds of stories; I like knowing I'm in good company. And it has me think, maybe my meanderings on the popover are leading me in the right direction as I consider what to do about my son's education. In the meantime, I have several books on hold at the library about the science of cooking.