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Relearning how to mix waffle batter
As autumn transitions to winter, a fresh bag of flour beckons me to do more baking. I started my long lunch break this afternoon with another attempt at making waffles. I still have not figured out, for this batch of flour, the precise level of moisture to ensure that the batter will form a crispy outer layer and pull away cleanly from the iron.
Investing in the proper measuring device (kitchen scale) would greatly augment the imprecise observations of sight and touch that I currently rely upon when mixing the batter. With sight and touch alone, I am easily deceived into thinking that the batter is behaving like the last previously successful mix. But this "mixing bowl memory" is not yet adapted to the new batch of flour or to the humidity of the kitchen in these colder months. With every new season or new bag of flour, my mixing bowl memory has to be recalibrated.
Teaching the same class from one semester to the next has the potential for a similar miscalibration. I fall back on the examples and explanations that worked for last semester's students, only to find that the students this semester fail to respond with the same enthusiasm and engagement. By the time I refine the lessons based on a better understanding of the current students, we've already moved on to a new topic, and the temptation to reuse last semester's assignments on that topic is too hard to resist.
In between classes this morning I commiserated with my colleague in the computer science department about the backlog of student papers we still had to evaluate. Without the help of teaching assistants, we spend most of our time giving feedback, which leaves little time for creating new assignments. The stale assignments (some dating back to the dawn of our teaching careers) will probably spark a different reaction from our current students than the reaction they sparked in previous classes (when those hand-crafted examples were fresh for both the instructor and the students). Coming up with new assignments each semester is what we owe to our students, no less than I owe it to consumers of my waffles to figure out the right amount of milk and yogurt that will yield a perfect crumb and a clean separation from the waffle iron.