Students make accounts for culinary chemistry and fine arts
Junior Margaret Shirey sets up her phone camera in front of the wheel before starting work on a carefully sculpted bowl. After working hard on the piece for an hour, she stops the time lapse and posts it to their class Instagram account: braultsbunch.
Whether it’s for culinary chemistry, sculpture or wheel throwing, student Instagram accounts are an addition to some classes. Art students post pictures and videos of their creations and progress in the class, while, for culinary chemistry, their posts count as a grade.
Science teacher Anneke Albright’s culinary chemistry class has a unique element to it. The student’s assignments are turned in via personalized Instagram accounts. Senior Justin McCray, who is in Albrigt’s class, enjoys the social media part of the class.
“The fun thing is that instead of uploading things on Schoology, like most classes would, we just post our creations on Insta instead,” senior Justin McCray said. “We mostly post foods we make at home, and things like that.”
Culinary students give their accounts fun usernames like “charlie_chops01,” and “jujubeanjustin.”
“Each person has their own account, and the names are personal. It has to connect to cooking while also incorporating your name,” junior Charlie Neuhoff said. “So it’s really interesting, [the way the class works]; I love it a lot.”
“We post random pictures, mostly funny things that we laugh about during class.”
Camille Gravel
Some of the assignments include homework over the weekends where students must post a picture of the meal they were assigned to cook and include a list of steps or instructions on how to prep and cook the meal in the caption.
“We’ll have a lot of assignments on the weekends,” Neuhoff said. “We’re only allowed to follow ESD culinary chemistry — and they follow us as well — which is run by our teacher Mrs. Albright. We’ll post pictures with the instructions of what to cook to show that we’re actually doing the assignment on time.”
Students mainly use Instagram to share their “lab cooks” with family and friends who follow the account. Albright decided to incorporate this into her class as a way to teach her students about internet safety.
“It started as a project for my Masters degree; I had this idea that social media is not going away, so what if we can use it as a familiar platform for educational purposes,” Albright said. “In culinary chemistry, students have a lot of at-home cooking assignments and need to share that work with me to get credit. I think the advantage is students stay more engaged in their learning and excited to share content about class related materials.”
Barbara Brault’s wheel throwing class also recently made a joint account for their small class of four. The account is for fun rather than being a part of the class like culinary chemistry.
“It was kind of a group decision [to make the Instagram account],” junior Margaret Shirey, who is in the class, said. “We all post on it and have the login for it cause our class is only four people.”
Not only do they upload pictures of their creations, but they also make videos. A recent video got up to 4,500 views.
“We mostly post progress and if someone finishes something we post that,” Shirey said. “We’re starting to do time lapses and stuff, so we made some of those.”
Similar to the ceramics class, senior Camille Gravel’s sculpture class had the idea last year to make an Instagram account to post their creations as well.
“Our class last year always took photos of our sculptures over time,” Gravel said. “We ended up wanting to post them somewhere, so we made an Instagram.”
In addition to progress updates on their creations in class, the students also post group pictures and funny things that happen in class.
“We post progress photos,” Gravel said. “We also post random pictures, mostly funny things that we laugh about during class.”
Throughout the years, the group has bonded through being in class together and posting amusing things on their joint account, cperiodsculpture23.
“We made the account last year when we were in C period so we named the account ‘cperiodsculpture23,’ not thinking we might have a different period,” Gravel said. “It was luck that we are still in C period sculpture so that we don’t have to change the name.”
Whether it’s used to grade assignments or students create one for fun, class Instagrams add a new and interesting aspect to the class and bring students together.
“It’s helped us to appreciate our unique pieces and branch out from the classics,” Shirey said. “We also have learned to really admire each other and are now close enough to take and give constructive criticism.”