Baking Taught Me Fractions by Sophia

Baking Taught Me Fractions by Sophia - June 2024 Scholarship Essay

Cream 1 cup of softened butter with ¾ cup of sugar and ¾ cup of brown sugar until fluffy. This is the first step I take to make amazing homemade chocolate chip cookies from the back of the Nestle Tollhouse chocolate chip bag. I don’t remember a time that I didn’t bake regularly. I started by helping my parents or Grandma out in the kitchen by mixing batter or spreading a filling. Eventually, I grew to finding my own recipes and experimenting in the kitchen. One important skill I grew through all of my years of baking was my fractional and mental math proficiency.
Baking is a precise science due to the whipping, leavening, and baking temperatures that could all affect the outcome of the sweet treat. Using the correct measurements of each ingredient in the correct ratio is the most important step. Often, I’ll be making just half or double of a recipe, which helped grow my fractions skills. Understanding that ¾ doubled is 1 ½ helps me to save time by using the 1 and ½ cup measurement once each instead of the ¼ cup measurement six times.
A few years ago I was baking lemon ricotta muffins, which I had made countless times before, but I was doubling the recipe for my birthday. Everything was going well and the muffins had gone in the oven. About an hour later we took the muffins out of the oven and they were flat and dense. I realized that instead of doubling ¾ of a teaspoon to 1 ½ teaspoons, I added 3 teaspoons of baking powder to the batter. Since there was too much leavener, the muffins rose too much and then collapsed. The simple mental math error made the whole batch of muffins inedible. After this mistake, I always make sure that I double-check my mental math quickly before messing up a recipe, or a math problem.
I had real-world experience using fractions, and once I was doing fractions in my classes, I knew the purpose and excelled. Years later, in my AP Precalculus class, we were still using these same fractional skills in class. Whether it be a slope or solving for x, knowing how to manipulate fractions was vital. Fractions continued to be reviewed during lessons for more complicated concepts. Since I continued to practice fraction manipulation through baking I was able to focus solely on the new content being taught.
Since December 2022, I have worked as a math tutor at Mathnasium. Most of my students are Elementary to Middle School age children who are also starting to learn fractions. Using analogies from my baking experience helps me to teach the children fractions in a new way. Tutoring has become my new way to maintain my quick fractional skills outside of class and help other students learn the same skills that will continue to be important later on in their math education.