Workshop promotes education through cooking
By Lauren McDonald, The Brunswick News
Students and teachers alike learned about math and science Tuesday morning while eating their own homemade ice cream.
At a workshop funded by the state Improving Teacher Quality grant, received by the College of Coastal Georgia School of Education and Teacher Preparation program in 2015, teachers have spent the last two weeks learning how to incorporate cooking into their math and science lesson plans.
During the first week of the program, teachers took mathematical concepts classes at the college.
And this week, the teachers met with students from the community at The Farmer & The Larder in downtown Brunswick to put their training into practice.
“It gives teachers the opportunity to practice the lesson plans and things that they learned before going back to school in the fall. In the fall they’ll I’ll implement it,” said Sharon Sellers-Clark, an assistant professor of education who helped write the grant.
Chef Matthew Raiford, executive chef and owner of The Farmer & The Larder, has taken part in the workshop for the last two years.
Brunswick Mayor Cornell Harvey also dropped by on Tuesday to see the workshop, and he said it’s a great chance for the students to learn these concepts.
He said he’s been trying to increase the presence of local students downtown, in hopes of the business community and local schools to work together more.
“Chef Raiford has been a great staple to our community, in fact he’s becoming almost an icon,” he said.
As a chef, Raiford said he spends every day doing math and science.
“Oftentimes I have people that think that you don’t need math and science for cooking,” he said. “They just think that you just throw your ingredients together and make it happen and you’ve got food.”
But he said this kind of education benefits students by providing them not only real-life skills, but also a new way to solve problems.
“Kids are testing all the time, but how do we keep the kids engaged and getting them to test well?” he said. “So when they’re sitting there and thinking, ‘How do I solve this problem,’ they can think, ‘If this was one-third or two-thirds plus a half, this is what it would be.’ Now the kid is sitting there doing fractions quickly because he’s thinking about it through cooking.”