Passing on the knowledge to the younger ones
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned at Green School is the importance to do things that benefit your community, not only yourself. And every time you do something for your community you are also doing it for yourself. When we started our fermentation project it came from a place of simple curiosity and interest in the subject. We all wanted to know how to ferment food. As we began to uncover more and more of the intricate layers of fermentation we really new we wanted to share this information with our community. But how? Then one of our teachers mentioned teaching a class to some younger year students. We all got very excited at the idea and reached out to the grade one teachers. They were awesome, and loved the idea. We prepared the class and our materials for pickle making and set of after lunch down to the grade 1B classroom.
We got to their classroom just before they did and had just enough time to set up our stations. I had personally never taught a class to anyone, though I had run workshops with high school students before. This being my only prior experience with handling large groups of students, I think I did pretty good. I think we all did pretty good.The first group of students was very rowdy and full of energy. But they really seemed to love making pickles with us. Although they were a little hard to handle at some points, my biggest take away from the first class was that they all had lot of fun and learned that cucumbers turn into pickles and not that they grow on pickle trees.
The second class was much more relaxed and listened to instructions a little better. I think it was also because we had had some experience with the first class. We had a lot of fun, and my group really liked tasting a little bit of all the ingredients before they went into the mixing bowl. It was very interesting watching them work together, cooperating and taking turns adding certain ingredients. We all got lots of hugs when we left, but we were invited back on Friday to try the pickles with them.
