Blog Your Blessings: Cookies

On Thursday after work, my daughter and I made cookies for a bake-off in her French class. How baking cookies has anything to do with learning French, I neither know nor care. All I know is we had fun with this recipe she found online to make apple spice cookies while the rains poured out of the heavens and the dog begged the afternoon away.

In my inner-city, Title I world hammered day after day by the demands of meeting levels of achievement on multiple-choice tests that come around every spring, the idea of taking time in September to make cookies for friends is delightfully liberating. It's nice to think there's a school in the world in which teachers understand that kids are kids, and achievement and progress and success depend as much on nurturing as they do on hammering them with academic activities.

Kids are kids. Letting that be and loving it for what it is can do more to help children succeed than driving them forward, worksheet after worksheet, like lemings into the sea. Standardized tests leave little time for teachers to treat kids like people. I am grateful for a teacher in my daughter's life who took that time. Thanks to that, Della and I had some time in the kitchen to road test a new recipe and find it good.