My first assignment was 4 classes of COOKING in a Middle School. Cooking!!! I am not a great cook. Probably not even average. But I can grill, saute, boil, broil, season and make somewhat decent dishes. I even bake my own bread. Thank you Jenny Jones. Which means I AM LIGHT YEARS AHEAD of these whipper snappers in middle school. I opened each class describing the various jobs in a restaurant. I told them that the food business can be a very good career with good salaries. Truthfully, I was just trying to sound halfway interesting. The absent teacher had fortunately left an assignment online for them, part of which consisted of pictures of 15 kitchen utensils, and the kids had to name each utensil. So I went from desk to desk, squatted down to be at the same level, and discussed with each child – this is called a whisk, let me help you spell it, do you know what it is used for? This is a slotted spoon, let’s google it and find out what we do with it. The kids seemed attentive and interested, and it was fun. In one day, over 100 children in Sunnyvale, CA, became more educated about cooking. Because of me. Is this a big deal in the grand scheme of things? On that very same day, 85 million educators worldwide enriched the minds of over a billion children. I was one of those educators. Perhaps the newest and clumsiest. But still, I was one of them. Yes.It is a very big deal indeed.
