CELPIP Listening Part 6 Practice Test: Cooking in the Classroom

NARRATOR: Ask most adults where they learned to cook, and the answers rarely involve a classroom. Some picked it up beside a parent at the stove; many, if they're honest, are still improvising with the help of a microwave. That gap has inspired a growing campaign to make cooking a regular part of the elementary school day, and the idea has divided parents and educators more sharply than its cheerful image might suggest.

NARRATOR: Registered dietitian Amira Haddad is among its most vocal proponents. She points out that children now get a substantial share of their daily calories from packaged and processed food, and that eating habits established before the age of twelve tend to persist well into adulthood. A child who has chopped a pepper, she argues, is far more likely to eat one. Haddad also maintains that the kitchen is an underestimated teaching tool: measuring flour involves fractions, watching dough rise is chemistry, and following a recipe demands patience and attentive reading. For families where both parents work demanding shifts, she adds, school may be the only place a child ever sees a meal made from scratch.

NARRATOR: Graham Whitfield, a retired principal who now sits on a school board in Manitoba, is unconvinced. He doesn't dispute the value of cooking; what he questions is the arithmetic. Elementary teachers, he notes, are already expected to cover an ever-expanding curriculum, and every new subject is squeezed out of the same six-hour day. Most schools built in recent decades have no kitchen at all, and outfitting classrooms with stoves, sinks and safety equipment would require resources that boards simply don't have. Whitfield also worries about allergies, since a single classroom may include children who cannot be near peanuts, eggs or shellfish. In his view, cooking is quite properly a family's responsibility, and schools that continually accept additional duties end up performing all of them poorly.

NARRATOR: Haddad's answer is that cooking need not be a separate subject at all. A fruit salsa or a no-bake granola bar requires no stove, she says, and a cart of donated utensils can turn an ordinary math lesson into a cooking lesson.

NARRATOR: Both positions carry considerable weight, but they may be less irreconcilable than they first appear. Whitfield is surely right that schools cannot do everything. Yet if a weekly fraction lesson ends with a bowl of salsa that children actually want to eat, it's hard to see what has been lost.