Fourth grade class spent Friday taste-testing pizza at local
establishments
Gilroy – Sure, pepperoni pies serve as the major attraction of Rucker Elementary School’s annul Pizza Walk but as the fourth graders will vouch, their teacher does a stellar job of blending math and grammar with cheesy deliciousness.
“I learned that fractions are easier to do with pizza,” 10-year-old Victor Oimos said. “It’s easier to do something that you can hold … visualize.”
And other students, including Emily Barham and Bella Marquez, both 10, said the lesson wasn’t just about arithmetic but also English, since the students were required to fill in a page of adjectives describing the taste and smell of the pizza they sampled and the ambiance of the parlors.
Every May for the past 20 years ago, Curt Hentschke has packed up his Rucker Elementary School class and led them on a Pizza Walk around town. Back in 1986, the fourth grade teacher happened to notice a lot of pizza parlors popped up all in a row and decided to organize a pizza taste-testing field trip that combines a variety of disciplines.
He incorporated the Pizza Walk into his spring curriculum, a time when the weather is warm and students are restless and “burnt out on the regular day-to-day” activities.
Originally a simple worksheet, the activity has evolved over the years. On Friday, 31 of Hentschke’s fourth grade gifted and talented students were handed an eight-page worksheet to complete during and after the Pizza Walk.
The day kicked off with a Papa Murphy’s Take ‘N Bake breakfast, courtesy of a student’s mother who brought in the cooked pie for a practice tasting in the classroom. After each student tried one-third of a piece, they headed off to the bus stop.
From 9:30am to 11am, the group hiked through downtown, making a few stops along the way. At 11am, the official tasting began at Little Caesar’s on First Street. The students then hit Mama Mia’s, Pizza Hut, Straw Hat, Round Table, Papa Murphy’s and Mountain Mike’s.
At each parlor, they recorded data, including the address, the cost of one large pepperoni pizza, the number of different drink sizes available, the number of different sizes of pizzas, the comfort of chairs from a one (rock) to a 10 (cloud), the ambiance and the overall ranking.
In the end, Barham and a few other students said they bit into the best slice at Mama Mia’s.
The students ordered the same kind of pizza and the same size at each stop to keep the variable as minimal as possible, one of the lessons Hentschke is teaching. But even though they ordered the same exact item at each pizza joint, the costs varied, with one pie ringing in at $5.41 and another at $16, Hentschke said.
