Baking a Cake

I'm not a chef, but I really enjoy cooking and baking. I've come to realize that being a first-year teacher is a lot like baking a cake.

I spend a lot of time planning. Having never taught these lessons before, it's a lot like creating a recipe for a cake. Can you sit down right now and write a recipe for a cake? I have some resources, like recipes that have worked for other people before, but mostly I have some recipes by a few people who have tried to make a cake once and then never shared their revisions.

So, I borrow this once-tried recipe, fix it up a bit based on my baking experience and walk into the kitchen. Some recipes work really well, and some work terribly. I try to remember what works and what doesn't. It's hard to know before I get to eat the cake what it's going to taste like. I can usually figure out as I'm making it whether I need to add a little more liquid, but sometimes it's a total disaster from the start.

I know that next year, when I take out the recipes I've already tried, I'll be able to look at them with some experience. I will be able to tell right away what sort of recipe tends to work better, and fix it up even more. I'll remember which recipes worked well in the past and which have to be entirely revised. But until then, I'm just revising recipes that I've never really used before.

And sometimes, the baking powder has gone bad or I crack an egg and it ruins the whole batch or a kid comes home to an empty house every day, and the cake doesn't even rise.