How to kill creativity
Our school Food Technology teacher was not a fan of food, or education.
This of course may not be true, but when I think back to cookery lessons, I remember being actually afraid. I remember being vexed that my recurrent tonsillitis never seemed to recur to coincide with cookery. I remember feeling levels of stress that I now associate with hospital waiting rooms.
Here are some recipes she terrified us into producing:
Tomato soup
This was the first recipe we made, age 11. I had never undertaken any aspect of soup preparation in my life. I had never eaten tomato soup that wasn’t Heinz.
We were given a recipe and told to get on with it. I remember the first instruction was Switch the oven on. I had never switched an oven on, so I asked the teacher how to do it. Oh reader, these were not the days of ‘there’s no such thing as a stupid question’.
This was a Stupid Question. I was not told the answer. I looked in sweaty panic to other work benches and copied other panicky children, who had the good fortune to have mothers who had shown them how to turn ovens on.
The next instruction was Peel an onion. I had never peeled an onion. But I had already used up my One Question and it had not gone well. I was on my own here.
Peel an onion. Ok, Annabel, just literally peel the onion.
So I peeled it. And peeled it. And there was another layer! I peeled that. Another one! Gosh there are a lot of layers. I referred back to the recipe. It didn’t say to stop.
Good. Job done. Onion peeled.
Next up! Chop the onion.
Now picture a small, bespectacled girl attempting to chop a pile of slippery onion peelings with, essentially, a butter knife. All the while praying the teacher doesn’t approach her table and loudly chastise her for being an utter moron.
Suffice to say the rest of the soup prep has been blanked out of my memory. I don’t remember eating it, but I remember Kate was not at all well after she ate hers. Viva Heinz.
Hummus
We made hummus long before it was on shelves in every supermarket. This was pretty forward-thinking for a 1992 cookery lesson.
The problem was we had literally no idea what it was for, as it was not explained.
Hummus out of context is quite baffling.
Kate threw hers in a hedge.
Cheese on toast
By the time we got onto cheese on toast I’d had the good sense to practise the recipe at home first, so I could stay as far below the teacher’s radar as possible.
Also, I was aided by the compulsory Flow Chart, killing all creativity, spontaneity and - most importantly - all fun.
Melting cheese is a complicated business.
Man alive there’s a page 2!
Even the eating part of this is laced with stress. EAT IMMEADIATELY (sic)
If I’d experienced any shred of pleasure in the making or eating of my cheese on toast - and I expect at best I felt relief at having simply survived and having remembered to switch off the multiple appliances involved - it was swiftly batted away by the requirement to write an evaluation.
There is not one single element of this experience that I felt I nailed. Could I melt cheese onto bread? Gosh, I don’t know. Um, it was economical? I think I used a good tool? Did I? What tool did I use? I didn’t have to peel any onions so that was good. Sorry about the messy grill. Sorry, sorry.
Sometimes I bake a batch of bread and feel stabs of self doubt. It used to be often rather than sometimes, but I have become so much better at talking to myself, and I certainly apologise less often to customers. Charging into my forties I am experiencing the gloriousness of a) clarity that everyone is flying by the seat of their pants aren’t they, and b) who cares! Even at my bleakest moments I can still say with confidence that my customers are unlikely to dump me for Tesco. And I definitely used the correct tool for the job.
I had been wondering where my self doubt came from, but reading this meek evaluation, I can tell you this is EXACTLY the tone of voice of my inner monologue when I’m at my most uncertain. It’s very weird to see it on a piece of paper that’s 30 years old.
Key change
Here’s the middle eight of this week’s letter: a glorious 8 bars of unfiltered enthusiasm.
Amongst the piles of school books that are making their way to our loft, I found this evaluation, written by my daughter who had been required to cast a critical eye over her Roman catapult, constructed from lolly sticks and rubber bands. She was 7 when she wrote this.
To start with, her worksheet asks her to rate her catapult.
BRILLIANT, she says. There was an option to adopt a little more modesty and still show some pride by stating it was simply Good. But no - stuff that - she thinks it was bloody brilliant and she’s not going to pretend otherwise.
Is there anything she could do to improve her catapult? Well, if it’s anything like my cheese on toast she’ll need to do a bit of light worrying about whether she left her work station clean, and catalogue her indecision about which switches should be on and which should be off.
But not her:
Nothing I love how it is!
YES! There are three more lines to expand on this, but she doesn’t need them. She knows what she feels about that wonky catapult, and she has no regrets.
The sheer gusto of her is one of the joys of my life. She has a certainty about her that I never had. AND she knows what hummus is for.
VHS incompetence and greasy ovens
To conclude this week’s lesson, let me paint you a picture of the last week of term. Usually lessons take on a slightly festive air don’t they. Maybe an off-curriculum experiment in Chemistry. Our RS teacher could definitely be distracted by almost anything, but would be particularly amenable to going completely off-topic in the final week of term. In French you’d watch a film that would almost certainly be massively too sexual for 12 year olds.
Any video of course would be prefaced by 10 minutes of flustered muttering from an overheating teacher who could never work the VHS. I don’t think I once witnessed a teacher load a video, turn the TV on, press play and it just started.
I seem to be digressing here, but I think you can relate to this feeling; of teachers loosening up a bit towards the end of term. I think this is universal.
Unless you are a Food Technology teacher who does not like food. Or teaching.
Then you get your class to clean the ovens on the last day of term. A dozen blackened, greasy, rancid ovens, encrusted with fear and misunderstood hummus.
Now we’ve had some distance, I wonder what that was all really about. I hope she’s okay. You can’t possibly be that joyless in a school teaching kitchen without needing, maybe a hug? Or perhaps a copy of Davina’s Menopausing, which I have already read cover to cover to mitigate future unhinging in my own kitchen.