For Steve Perkins, the title of his new book started out with a story he included in an early draft.

A teacher was describing their breakfast that morning and told their students they had waffles. They asked their students to draw a picture of a golden waffle, spell the word waffle, and notice how many vowels and consonants are in the word. By simply speaking that two syllable word - waffle - the teacher communicated an idea to their students from something that happened earlier that day at breakfast. A simple prompt led to a full lesson, succinctly summarizing the joy of education. 

“The Golden Waffle Principle: Finding Meaning in Teaching” is a compilation of Perkins’s 34 years of experience in the classroom and the joy he’s found as a teacher. Whether teaching at public schools to private ones, in Texas or in Indiana, Perkins, an IU alumnus and 2014 Indiana Teacher of the Year, wrote about discovering, in his words, the joy, the life, the true, the good, and the beautiful in education.

“I think too often all of us, from teachers to admins to parents and even students have come to a wrong understanding of what education is,” he said. “Education is a living thing, it’s a distinctly human thing. It involves humans about human things. What should you see in any learning experience? You should see life, you should see joy. Even today, you can still see that.”

Perkins had retired from teaching before he returned to his current position as a Latin teacher at Guerin Catholic High School in Noblesville, Indiana, and has maintained a blog on education topics for many years, some of which shows up in “The Golden Waffle.” His ideal audience for the book? Anyone with an interest in education: grandparents, legislators, school board members, parents, and especially teachers. 

Perkins knows the difficulties that face teachers, especially those just entering the field.

“Connect with what you love. Tie into what you are passionate about. Just because something is hard, don’t take that as a signal as ‘I shouldn’t do this.’ You might need to push through and give it a couple years,” he advised. 

“Even in the midst of structures that aren’t ideal, the individual teacher can find ways to help students engage in the shared journey of discovery. That’s really to me what education is,” he added.

“The Golden Waffle” is available to buy on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.