Use Cooking to Teach Math

Many scratch their heads as to why students in culinary arts and hospitality programs do not "get math." One of the many reasons students do not get math is that, according to cognitive psychologists, the brain does not like to think and when a student is faced with a "math problem" the brain does not think it can solve it wont' try. A corollary to this cognitive principle lies in the example of crossword puzzles. The crossword puzzle in the Sunday NY Times is a very difficult puzzle to solve compared to perhaps the one in your local paper. If you were to start doing crosswords for a hobby and started with the one in the NY Times you might very well give up because your failure rate would be high and signal "I am not good at crossword puzzles!" On the other hand, if you started with the one in your local newspaper your initial success rate might be very high leading you to think you can do crossword puzzles and once mastered the one at the local level perhaps attempt one that is more difficult but less so than the NY Times. So the way in which a math problem is presented initially to a student signal's whether or not that person "thinks" they have a fighting chance at solving it.

Think for a moment. How many reading this have taken the SAT test? How well did you do on those problems that said, "You are having ten people for dinner. You cannot sit Aunt Anne next to Uncle Bob, and Grandma Smith prefers to sit near Uncle Ed, and on and on..." I don't know about you but when faced with those problems my brain would freeze up and my response would be, "Who cares, let them sit next to whomever they happen to sit and deal with it!"

Perhaps another reason so many struggle to teach culinary math to students is that they try to teach them math first and then apply it to cooking. What if it were the other way around? What if cooking was used to teach math instead? This simple reversal in the way we think about teaching culinary math may be the very thing that helps students convince themselves they can do math. Indeed many of the students who are in your program right now believe they can cook while at the same time they fear math (my classes will be filled with them in the fall). What if we took their belief in themselves to cook and leveraged it to help them believe they can do culinary math?

To that end, Jennifer Wagaman thinks that, "many math lessons can be taught in the kitchen by having children cook and manipulate various kitchen tools." To read some of the tips she gives for teaching math using cooking -- instead of the other way around -- visit the following website and click around when there as there is lots of really good information on teaching basics.

http://teaching-strategies-mentorship.suite101.com/article.cfm/teaching_math_in_the_kitchen