#17 | Alter-Ed: Part 1 - Kitchen Soup for the School-Going Soul
Reflections on a year of 'alternative' schooling
Editor’s Note: Heyo, Multitude readers, and a happy end-of-year to you. We’re ending 2023 and starting 2024 on a slightly different note. The next three posts are going to be written by Kartika Menon, a close friend who’s taught at an alternative school in Bangalore for the last 1.5 years. I’ve heard her speak with wonder about the different world the school’s introduced her to, and wanted others to share in these experiences. Today’s piece starts, appropriately unconventionally, in the kitchen. I hope you enjoy it.
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The Kitchen as a Portal
‘Hold it straight and then chop’, says my colleague. Her little nose scrunching up in concentration, four-year-old Tamu turns and asks - ‘Like this?’ The glittery skirt she’s draped around her shoulder looks like a cape, sequins shimmering as her hands fiddle with the carrot she’s been handed. I sit and watch, sipping some water and making notes for my next lesson. It is the pre-primary kids’ kitchen period. Here in my school, in the makeshift corrugated iron structure we call our kitchen, the students rotate work. They chop, clean, peel, fry, mash, and grate, rushing to make breakfast and lunch for the 100-odd members of the school community.
One of the several ‘alternate’ schools in Bangalore, my school is a small institution set up barely seven years ago. The kitchen is the heart of the school. It is where we all assemble, where the bell hangs, where meals are served, rejected, enjoyed, and cleared off.
Having come from a string of pretty conventional schools myself, this whole system was completely alien to me. I grew up school-hopping, from town to small city to large metropolis, but mostly in government-run schools where every student came with a packed tiffin. At every recess, dabbas were a competition. The sandwich and pancake kids got all the attention while the roti-and-dal kids were looked upon with disdain. Food was decidedly individual and incredibly divisive. It brought with it shame and anger, unequally and with great frequency.
These realisations came to me as an adult and, though I now could critique the system, I didn’t know of any alternative.
That was until now. I joined this school and discovered that food could be a collective endeavour, a united labour whose fruits were enjoyed by all.
This first insight would lead to many more as time passed. With each day, I gained a greater appreciation for the many functions of the school kitchen. Through my journey at school, it has been a site of learning, of refuge, and also of reckoning.
The Kitchen and its Lessons
New to the city and the language, the kitchen is where I began collecting some basic Kannada vocabulary. Some of the songs we sang helped me figure out the words for fruit - ‘belage belage bale hannu’ - literally, ‘morning morning bananas’. It is a school favourite. Well, a favourite for the little ones as the older teens roll their eyes, their masks firmly in place and their mouths glued shut.
Mensinkaayi, hirekayi, kumbalkayi - I sound out the words as my students nod along. ‘It’s kumbalanga in Malayalam!’, I say, happy to make the connection. Armed with this fledgling lexicon, I march to the vegetable cart, tentatively point at the coriander and mumble ‘Kothambari beku’ - and mentally whoop as the vendor drops it into the weighing scale. In my hybrid malayalam-hindi-kannada-english, I navigated the city with what the kitchen taught me.
Inspired by this, I encouraged students to translate back and forth during our English lessons. We took it upon ourselves to amp up the weekly food schedule. How best to describe ‘bisi bele bhat’? “A fragrant, spicy blend of rice, lentils, and vegetables”, my seventh graders suggest, and giggle. How ridiculous. Yet, we kept at it, trying to sound like a posh restaurant menu. “The gojju avalakki - its tangy tart sweet burst of flavour is a true revelation”. Would this make someone curious? Would it make them drool? Would it make them roll their eyes? As we took down notes from the kitchen staff, we rushed back to the classroom vocabulary board to add the word ‘delectable’.
Here in the kitchen, I tried eating ragi mudde, while the first graders instructed me - no chewing. We dip it in saaru, and then slowly let it melt. My colleague tells me the story of the mudde, how it was allegedly Devegowda’s ‘favourite’ meal - a comment that shot the millet ball to fame across Karnataka and other parts of the country. A lesson in politics; one of many it would teach us.
Our environmental management begins in the kitchen with waste segregation, lessons on composting, and mindful use of resources. Similarly with economics, where the kitchen is a tool to teach costing and budgeting for large meals. On a summer day a few years ago, after intensive kitchen-gardening sessions, the students even set up a small vegetable market of their own.
In science, of course, the kitchen is the original laboratory. Patre-beakers, ladle test tubes. The boiling pot, the water cycle in motion. Why does the dosa batter ‘pulichify’ or turn sour, what makes the pan non-stick, why does the upittu solidify this way?
Why why why?
And then, when you tire of the whys, there is also art in the kitchen, and music. There are games, and there is silence. There is everything, really, depending on how hard you look.
The Kitchen and Community
Using the kitchen for academic concepts is not a particularly unique phenomenon. Many of our school’s pedagogical choices – using the body, doing hands-on work, interweaving art into different subjects, and project-based learning – are found across schools. In fact, bigger schools use such methods in conjunction with better infrastructure. So why is it that the school has felt so different to me? In fact, what makes it ‘alternative’? When we have our weekly teacher meetings, we keep circling back to this question - why do we exist, what do we value, what is our intent?
We keep going back and forth, agreeing and disagreeing on many things. For me, it’s not a particular subject pedagogy that works differently here. It is the stress on community - trying to build a place where children, parents, and teachers come together to teach and learn, where work is communal, where resources are shared freely and where support is abundant.
So just like the teachers and kids, parents have their own rota to help out in the kitchen. There’s a detailed schedule with a disclaimer: Help needed at every level! It doesn’t matter if you’ve never cooked. You could serve food, help with purchases, or introduce a new recipe. Most parents take to the task with gusto, using the kitchen to different ends. The only Sikh parents in the school brought kadha prashad on Gurupurab, introducing the children to the religion’s founder over hot servings of halwa. A couple brews hot Sulaimani chai in December, while another brings along ice cream for relief in the middle of the dog days. Some parents are quieter, sticking to the basics, but always showing up.
If some can’t make it on a particular day, they ask for a swap. No one gets away with just showing face at the parent-teacher meetings, demanding scores. And the thing is, no one wants to. It’s a system that welcomes you to contribute in whichever way you can, without making it a competition. It’s also a system that makes the parents more appreciative of everything it takes to run the school. When you’ve spent whole days peeling garlic cloves, you know not to complain about the kitchen roster. You know why help is essential.
Even on slower days, with relatively less demanding meals, there will always be dishes to wash. So right behind the kitchen is the washing area, where everyone cleans their utensils. The waste goes into the ‘cow bucket’, which is lugged across the road to the farm. The plate is dipped into a basin first and then washed. The littlest ones stand on a stool to reach the sink, and the older ones help them out. Diligently. Every day. We even have a song for it, which goes ‘Rinse the plate with soap and water, fa la la la la, la la la la’, in an attempt to make the whole exercise more festive.
The kitchen and dining hall are also thoroughly cleaned during ‘wind-up time’, the last half hour of the day. A ninth grader does the sweeping, while the seventh grader mops. The floors are scrubbed clean, bottles refilled, and the kitchen shutter is drawn down. The same process is replicated across the entire school.
When I think of education as a transformative tool, a medium through which equality can be attained, then this communal work stands out to me as truly powerful. Boys, girls, men, women - everyone is in the kitchen, everyone is cleaning. No one is expected to pick up after the other. Help is always around the corner, of course, but that’s what it is. Help. We owe each other that equally.
It’s not perfect, of course. Even in such systems, hierarchies creep in, and prejudices inform choices. I’d hear some kids loudly denounce meat-eating, or deem some chores as too ‘icky’ even as someone else performs them.
That said, having come from a schooling where this whole idea in itself would be unacceptable (Can’t you hear a shrill voice say ‘My kid? Cleaning the bathroom?!’) - I see what these practices are addressing from a very young age. We do this every single day. It is not a token gesture, a sensitisation visit meant to suddenly bring awareness. It is a habit, a way of living, a no-nonsense step in the process. That, I think, works like nothing else. This is your space, these are your people, and you have to put in the work just like everyone else.
The Kitchen and I
Through its mere existence, as well as all its functions, the kitchen immediately sets the school apart to anyone who walks in. So too for me. The kitchen was my welcome, its smells and sounds ushering me into this new world. I immediately loved it, yes. It was indisputably magical.
But here’s where I make a confession. I was also immediately terrified of it. Here I was, the youngest on the faculty, at my first-ever in-person job. In my head, I had a lot to prove. During my first few days, I was carefully crafting my classroom personality – friendly and approachable, but firm when needed. As much as the school operated differently from any other workplace, it was still a space where I wanted to be taken seriously. A mini-me sat on its haunches in my head, stubbornly yelling: I am an adult! I am responsible! I am as capable as all the other teachers!
My teacher-identity was thus being forged with certain goals. When I walked into the kitchen that first week, this identity was challenged. I’d come eager to do my share and was asked to cut a somewhat complicated fruit that I had never cut before. It sat there looking at me, spikes and all - mocking me, I thought, that smug thing.
Now, it’s a fruit. It needn’t have been as serious as I made it out to be. Then again, as an English teacher, I was simply doing my duty of reading symbolism into everything. So the possibility that I might mess up the cutting of this fruit evolved into something much greater.
5-mark analysis: My hesitation itself was an admission of defeat. It was an acknowledgement of my inexperience. They’d be able to tell, just by how I held my knife, that I was still making emergency calls to Amma asking her how many whistles it takes for rajma to cook. Would this not destroy my responsible-adult image? That too in front of all these students who know their way around a kitchen? What right would I then have to claim to be their teacher?
Following this rather logical train of thought, my only obvious conclusion was to dodge the kitchen as much as possible. I would do the basics - the bare minimum that everyone does. Wash, clean, put away. I would help peel sometimes, or supervise my students as they worked. I would take on extra school projects - school website, annual play, a new academic programme - to justify to myself that I was contributing to the community in different ways and it was okay if the kitchen was not my strength.
I did this for nearly fourteen months, till I got news of a PhD offer and decided to take it. All too soon, it was my last term at school. I finally confronted myself. I had learned, through all this time, that my ‘perfect’ image was an irresponsible one to create. Mistakes, as we kept saying to our students, were essential to learning. Case in point: had I never emphasised my L’s wrong, I’d never have discovered that the word ‘helu’ could be an instruction to speak, or to excrete, depending on how you pronounce it. That is a learning now firmly lodged in my brain and on my tongue.
So you see, I had had enough school kids laugh in my face by this point to realise how silly my kitchen-complex was. The epiphany was entirely too late to arrive, though, leaving me with just a few weeks to right my wrongs. Still, I used them to timidly sort through leaves or silently watch and ask for recipes that I could practise.
As I grappled with my useless guilt, I also wondered if my avoidance had been judged harshly. The kitchen and its people, I discovered, bore no grudges. On my last day, the special menu included masala dosa - a laborious and rare undertaking. When I showed up at the kitchen teary-eyed after saying goodbye to one of my classes, I was told to wait for a bit. Ten minutes passed, and heaped onto my plate was a gigantic dosa, made only for me. All the little kids crowded around, wanting to see the ‘Kartika Dosa’.
More than the speeches and the cards and gifts that were offered to me that day, the dosa was the most fitting form of farewell. It was no severance package and goodbye hamper - not a transaction or obligation or courtesy. Like with the fruit-that-would-not-be-cut, I infused the dosa with symbols. Kinder ones, this time. Acceptance and forgiveness. I ate every bite of it, slowly, surely, and with no uncertain knowledge that I was loved and cared for. Warm, hearty, nourishing: the kitchen’s parting gift was proverbial soup for my school-leaving soul.
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That’s it for this week and this year. To maintain continuity, the next piece will come out in the middle of January, with the last coming at the end. To get them straight in your inbox, sign up above. Do share this post with others who might like it.
Kartika and her friends Dakshayini Suresh and Shivani Raturi have recently launched a podcast called The Pedagogy Of, where they discuss learning in all its forms. If you enjoyed this piece, you might like their conversations. You can listen to the show on Spotify below.
See you in the middle of January,
Shantanu