Owning a Restaurant
The classroom may be occupation based and rotate through different occupations
each month. For example the theme for this month may be, “The Life of a
Restaurant Owner.” Students would be involved in a variety of aspects of an
owner’s life such as keeping a budget balanced, making food, creating a menu,
and so on. Dewey states that, “by occupation I mean a mode of activity on the
part of the child which reproduces, or runs parallel to, some form of work
carried on in social life (p132).” Subjects can relate to all areas of owning
a restaurant such as art knowledge and skills utilized for developing a
marketable sign, building, and menu that will appeal to their desired
customers. Science and health can be found in cooking and understanding why
certain ingredients are in what recipes, what they do to the food, why certain
foods are cooked, and so on. When calculating budgets and profits math is
necessary. Geography and history can come from the menu, the types of food
served, and where a productive location would be to place the restaurant.
Reading is essential to creating a productive restaurant, without it the whole
project would fall apart. Dewey might agree with this project because the
students would be working the problems “out for themselves with the actual
material, aided by questions and suggestions from the teacher (p21).” They
would greater understand each area’s importance because they are “working it
out experimentally, thus seeing its necessity (p21).” This would lead to less
or lack of the question that I often hear in classrooms, “but why do we have to
do this, I’ll never use this.” This project also focuses on Dewey’s proposal
of creating a classroom around an occupation. He states, “the fundamental
point in the psychology of an occupation is that it maintains a balance between
the intellectual and the practical phases of experience (p133).” Lastly this
project brings all the different aspects of education together so that students
can make connections to better understand what they are learning. Dewey’s
words lead me to believe that he would agree, “the occupations articulate a
vast variety of impulses, otherwise separate and spasmodic, into a consistent
skeleton with a firm backbone (p138).”
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