Teaching with Jamie Oliver

Here’s a little holiday anecdote for all teachers. Actually, there’s no reason why students won’t also find it helpful - even more so if they’re thinking of going into teaching.

A while back I saw Jamie Oliver making this very nice looking - sorry - ‘pukka’ - Tarte Tatin on the telly. Consumed by greed, I foolishly swallowed Jamie’s advice that this would indeed be easy to make, and hurriedly assembled the ingredients.

Alas, it turned out to be a disaster.

The problem, I’m sorry to say, was not with my cooking. Certainly not! Of course, they do say you have to take responsibiity for your own learning, but that’s what I was doing - trying something new.

No, this was clearly a teacher error.

The error? Well, Jamie is, I have to admit, quite good at cooking. So when he was boiling up the sugar and water to make the caramel, he of course, did not measure anything out, nor did he check the temperature. Because he’s done this so often, he just did it visually. And said it was easy.

I subsequently discovered, that heating up sugar, is in fact pretty complicated. Only a few degrees of temperature separate at least 3 - and according to Wikipedia, nine stages. If you mess these up, you don’t get caramel, you get toffee. If you get a few more degrees you get reinforced concrete toffee. That doesn’t make for a very tasty Tarte Tatin.

The moral of this tale?

There are several.

First, just because you’re good at something, doesn’t mean you will be good at teaching it.

Second, you must never make assumptions about what is easy, or how much knowledge a ‘learner’ or your audience has. If they don’t know that a few more degrees and a few more seconds will turn their nice mouldable caramel into rock hard toffee, it might be a good idea to warn them

On with the teaching.