French Bread Tastes Different When it’s Raining

I worked in a few restaurants when I was younger. I don’t remember all of the names and some that I do I’ll keep quiet about (lest someone should inquire regarding trade secrets gleaned from high quality VHS viewing in the backroom for training). I moved away right after college and have spent most of my adult life here, in Vermont. My experiences with those restaurants offered me opportunities to learn about food, preparation and service from a variety of perspectives. I worked in a bagel shop, a fast food chain, a modified chain (on the boardwalk no less), a fine dining establishment and another middle of the road locale. I’ve prepared food that people liked, people tolerated, and, likely, that people loathed. I learned to fry eggs on a griddle without breaking the yolk, evenly distribute sauce on a pizza, find the time when a burger become chili, and how to make a strawberry look like a flower to justify the cost of $10 salad (prices adjusted for inflation).

  Based on my experiences between the ages of 15-19, I learned about habits, process and customer service. My knife skills were considerably better toward the end. I am not a chef. I can cook, passably. What I learned in restaurants helped me understand the complexities of systems change in my time in the field of education in Vermont. My experience here mirrors my careers in the food service industry. I’ve worked in an alternative school as a behavior counselor and teacher, as a clinical case manager for a social services agency, worked in an elementary and middle high school as a teacher, and in elementary schools as a principal. My own kids are in middle and high school now. Food availability is different now than it was when I was their age. They express disbelief when I tell them that. Maybe it was where I grew up, where we were at as a family or some combination, but the concept of eating ripe strawberries in February was downright ludicrous, let alone something so abstract as cilantro or kumquat (apologies for those who think the former tastes like soap, your taste buds are wrong and furthermore, why do you eat soap?). Habits were something that I valued as a teacher starting out. They were a fixed value in education. I knew that rote practice would help my students (How? Well, it helped me). I just was not sure how to effectively offer it, so I gave homework – a lot of it. I replicated the classes that were taught to me in high school and I had learned relatively effectively. Why would my students not? What I failed to notice is that habits come more easily to some people for a variety of reasons. I struggled with understanding of students completing homework at various times in my career and it drove me a bit batty. What I came to learn too slowly is that students – like adults – possess agency. That agency is not a fixed asset, but vacillates depending on myriad factors. I see it in my 

own children. I see it in myself now too. I have the capacity at times to read a lot and – in often very similar circumstances – I cannot read a single page with any level of comprehension. We need to allow for differences in agency within our students and staffs. Our habits inform us, but are impacted by our atmospheres (like how baking is impacted by humidity). Process is important to culture. There’s no such thing as starting from scratch. If there’s nothing else, there’s a recipe (which likely came from trial and error). When people are nostalgic about food they often relate it a parents or grandparents cooking or a special event from their past. I occasionally feel nostalgic for food from a particular restaurant, but realize that the atmosphere, the company, the mood I’m in impacts my remembrance thereof. I almost always regret it when I try to replicate something from the past that I recall with fondness. Food and education are similar in some ways. Everyone knows of food and where they like to eat (and yet rotisserie hot dogs at gas stations). Many people have an idea of what education is, what it should be, and how to go about making sure it is something with which they are familiar. This nostalgia for what impacted individual success ignores outlying struggle and failure. There are many great published writers from my tenth grade English course. There are some great teachers of literature. None of them were in my summer school English class that year. When we embrace the culture of the past, we ignore that we know more than we did 10 years ago (or as is the case of my 10th grade English class a few more than that, think Vanilla Ice). We know better the impact of brain based learning, trauma, poverty, effective communication,and more. The process of education needs to change with regard to how we support students. We need to change the culture to support all learners (our friend groups from high school are not always representative of all learners). Customer service impacts restaurants and education. When I worked in the bagel shop, I was typically the only one working. I was the front end and the back end. I knew that learning orders was more important than learning names most, but not all, of the time. Some customers warrant more attention than others. Some students have greater needs. The ability to meet the market demand in education is not easy, nor is it in restaurants. Some entities market themselves through direct advertising. Education typically does not. The narrative of education plays out haphazardly and in cycles (budget, election, scandal, etc). At times the narrative comes across as expository, others persuasive. We read about proposed legislative changes and per pupil expenditures.

What education in Vermont needs is someone to write the narrative. Too often, this writing happens in retrospect, in review. Rarely do you read about a good decision made on a formative assessment to revisit equivalent fractions based on an exit ticket that a teacher read at 9:30 after putting the kids to bed. The creation of a generative can tell the story of education in real time. The public needs to hear the stories of impact, equity and opportunity. The impact of legislative acts and rules continues to shift toward the facilitation of student learning. That story needs to be told, not passively. Undoing work ignores that educational institutions are introspective and outcome oriented. We are working toward equity. It is continuous improvement of opportunity. Telling that story continuously needs a forum and a format. We need to continue to move forward and build something new, not rebuild something old. Working toward a system of personalization and flexibility will have starts and stops, but it needs iteration. If PLP continues to be a piece of the puzzle that confounds, that piece needs to be revisited, not scrapped altogether. Education needs to serve all of its customers. It’s time to embrace the shifts, tweak as needed, and allow for the quinoa. —   Matthew DeBlois, Principal Vergennes Union Elementary School Rowland Fellow 2011