The Cake Lesson

by Maggie MacDonnell

I won what is considered to be the Nobel Prize of Teaching, a one million dollar (USD) prize awarded annually to an outstanding teacher. I stood out from a field of 20,000 nominated teachers from 169 countries. As a “settler Canadian,” I worked in an Inuit (Indigenous) community experiencing the chronic crises directly related to the heavy burdens of colonization, genocide, residential schools, displacement and more.

I witnessed my students battle with the youth suicide crisis. I stood shivering at their frozen graveyards, tear drops freezing as they rolled off my eyelashes, watching my teenage students lower the coffins of their peers into the enduring tundra. I cried with them as they shuffled into homes to give condolences to grieving parents. I held my breath as I also watched them walk and counsel their friends back from the brink of those same life and death decisions. I read their social media posts about their own heart-wrenching vulnerabilities – so raw, so brave, so real. When I arrived, I didn’t even know the acronym of SEL (socio-emotional learning) but it soon became central to all I was doing. With few school board resources to lean upon in relation to the scale of the issue, much of my learning happened through experience. My students, themselves, teaching me lessons I carry with me to this day.

I call this one “The Cake Lesson”. It was a spring morning, the tundra was still snow-covered but the sunny days were stretching longer and longer, and slowly and softly the ice was beginning to melt. You could occasionally hear the drip drip of snow melting from roofs. Geese flying overhead were being sighted, with glee, by my teenage students (and hunters) who would follow them into the mountains hoping to make their grandmas smile with a nice catch! Instead of heavy parkas, you could walk around in just a hoodie (in my case) or your springtime light weight parka, if you were lucky to have a loving seamstress in your family. The spring air is the freshest in the world – crisp and cold, and thousands of miles away from polluting factories. If air could be bottled and sold (please, if there is a cunning capitalist reading this – though I doubt you are my target audience – ignore this brilliant idea) the Inuit would be the richest folks in the world. This is spring in the North. I rushed through a lesson to carve out time to share a birthday cake I had made for a student turning sweet 16. She had been an “at risk” kid, a drop out, in a really vulnerable situation. I’ll spare the details. But do you know those ACE Trauma tests which attempt to measure adversity and trauma? Well, she was a top scorer. She had seen more than a lifetime of trauma, all packed into 16 years. But, in incredibly good news, I had managed to encourage her back to school that September. It started off fragile, and I held my breath every day in October and November wondering if she would walk through the classroom door. But now we were in month six and she had found her groove. Perfect attendance, a flock of friends, she had even convinced her younger sister to come back to school too!  And more than just physically being there, she was there in spirit and mind! Always eager to engage in all the school had to offer, as if making up for lost time when she had dropped out.

Now, let me clarify something: I may have teaching tricks up my sleeve, but I am no baker. I had learned last minute it was her birthday, and that her family was not in town to celebrate. I tried my best to whip up a cake, throwing flour, sprinkles, and sugar around my apartment late in the evening. Wait. Who am I kidding? Let me be transparent before my husband comments on this blog and reveals the truth. I sprinted to the one store in town and bought a “cake in a box” from the baking aisle. I needed every head start I could get in the baking world, and I want to thank Betty Crocker for helping teachers like me make it to the various birthday finish lines. The next morning, I skated on the ice-covered road (more slippery in the spring when there is a layer of melting water on them!), balancing this cake in my wolf fur lined mittens. I was zigzagging through the route, hoping one of the dozen huskies I passed on my walk to school would not swipe it from my arms.

With 10 minutes before the recess bell, I presented the cake to her and the class. We sang, blew candles, and smeared icing on her nose. It felt innocent, joyful, and even carefree. If this was a movie scene, though, there would be some foreshadowing background music to give the viewer a heads up that this was not all about frosting and sprinkles. Something bigger was about to emerge. I wish I could have heard that background music, but I was lost in the moment, silently patting myself on the back for producing a pretty darn good cake!

As the recess bell rang and her classmates spilled out the door to catch up with their friends, the birthday girl, my student, lingered and waited for a moment until the class was empty save for the two of us. She said, “Thanks for the cake,” and then a long pause. She took a big inhale. Her face was down, and she was scuffing her sneakers. Slowly she lifted her head, rolled back her shoulders, her long hair cascading down her back and said, as a smile slowly stretched across her face, “I’m really glad I made it to this birthday. Not long ago, I didn’t even think I would make it to 16. I thought I would have committed suicide by now. I’ve lost so many of my family and friends, some who never made it to 16. I thought my destiny was suicide. But I made it to today. I’m 16 and I am still here! Nakurmiik (thanks) again for the cake.” She flashed a brilliant smile. Then she grabbed her fur lined parka, spun around and in doing so, whipped her hair and this life lesson across my face. Out the door she went. Now I had all of 9 minutes left in recess to process this lesson. I am writing this for the teachers out there who know we get hit with these bombshells and are supposed to keep juggling it all because the school day marches on. There are few to no “time outs” in this profession to unpack some of the stories we are asked to hold.

I like to think I already knew that I TEACH KIDS FIRST and then I TEACH CONTENT. I had been in that context for several years at that point. I had attended too many funerals. I had been in countless crisis sessions. I wasn’t naive or at least didn’t think I was. But on that day, my student took me deeper into that lesson of “kids before content.” She unpacked, for me, how  even a “carefree” birthday cake had so many layers. It was another insight into what so many students, particularly Indigenous students and others who carry so much on their shoulders, are going through. But in a teaching world that preaches “child-centered practices,” I am going to counter with the fact that we seem to almost always center and fund the wrong data. We count the PISA results. We count how many cross that stage on graduation day. We count the credits. But my student, do you know what she was counting? She was counting her birthday candles – each and every one of those sweet 16 candles and the shimmering flames of resilience and overcoming they represented. 16 years full of heartache, unbearable loss, funerals and families buried in a graveyard she passed every day on the way to school. 16 years of still showing up and finding ways to love oneself, protect and nurture hope and joy, and care for her sister and friends, all in a context where pain is also so apparent. And, thankfully, there was a school and teachers that were supporting her journey, stumbling as we were.

To speak point-blank, I was teaching in a crisis – where socio-emotional regulation was one of our most pressing concerns, if not THE concern. If we didn’t deal with where our students were at emotionally, it was rare that we were going to have much success with any of our academic tasks. As teachers, we tumbled through this reality like towels in laundry. We had few professional programs, quality training or assigned mentors to draw upon to truly help us out in building relationships with students in such a context. There seemed to be a new investment in a math program, a rewrite of a history program, and ministry announcements for new funding for STEM and coding. Let me applaud that. There is no greater investment than in education. But when we take a critical look at our schools, where is the investment, the budget line and code for personal development and wellness – which we keep saying is at the heart of these systems? This is the metric (financial, time, training, resources) or pie chart I would like to see.

This is an attempt to describe how I built relationships with my students. I fumbled, fell down, got up, tried again, grasped for ideas, googled, Facebook-creeped my students on painfully slow internet, wore my heart on my sleeve, embarrassed myself with regularity, lost a lot of sleep in deep worry, strained my own nuclear family as I was not always “present,” tried to “think like a teenager,” made playlists to match their musical taste, and would just about try anything to connect with my students. It was NOT easy. There is no Betty Crocker cake in a box “just add eggs” solution for how white outsider teachers can connect in an Indigenous community and, much more importantly, HELP KIDS CONNECT WITH THEMSELVES!

As a stressed-out mother/ teacher during the various waves of COVID, let me also say that when new programs would land in my inbox, I was at peak burnout. I cautiously looked at everything with more than a healthy amount of skepticism. In fact, most times I didn’t even want to click on another program to “support” teachers. We teachers don’t have much time to waste. So don’t send us down dead ends or gaslight us with these programs that are supposed to “support” us. When the folks behind Captains & Poets reached out to me, I decided to park my bias. When I clicked on their videos, I saw, heard and felt the students speak from their hearts (as poets) with a bold clarity (unleashing their captains). It brought back a flood of memories from teaching grounded in connection to the cake story above to so many more!

It reminded me that teaching is complex, layered, dynamic and an utterly human experience,  which makes it hard and meaningful, powerful and vulnerable. If it was just sage-on-the-stage style, maybe it would be more manageable, but shallow. Teachers now are asked to see our students not as empty buckets to fill, but more like seeds of talents, interests and lived experiences growing in various socio-economic gardens that we as teachers need to nurture, cultivate, shine some sunlight on, irrigate, and co-create with. As we make these pedagogical pivots, we need to lean first into what makes us human.

Maggie MacDonnell, aka “The Million Dollar Teacher” was chosen from over 20,000 nominated teachers from 179 countries. Maggie has spent decades teaching with and learning from resilient populations across the globe – including East African refugees to Inuit in the Canadian Arctic. Maggie tears down the traditional classroom walls and co-creates new ones – rooted in a pedagogy of community, empowerment and woven together with empathy, love and relationships. She has been named one of the BBC Top 100 Women, as well as a Visionary with the Albert Einstein Institute. She is using her prize money to fund a QAJAQ/KAYAK program to raise awareness about climate change and reignite cultural pride within Inuit youth.

Teacher. Feminist. Time Traveller … and  Winner of the $1,000,000 Global Teacher Prize.