Here are the remaining five of 10 critical things you must teach your students if you want them to earn meaningful jobs, plus some sound advice on how to interact with potential employers.

By Adam Weiner, CFSE

Last issue I explained that it is critical to not only teach your students technical skills, but also the soft skills needed to get a job, keep a job and prosper in life. I suggested that you spend the summer revising and updating your curriculum to add job-searching skills. I published the first five things to teach, and now here are the remaining five:

Here are the first five of 10 critical things you must teach your students if you truly want them to earn gainful employment.

By Adam Weiner, CFSE

I am a firm believer that we must not only teach our students technical skills, but we must also teach them jobs skills and life skills. If they can’t get a job, can’t keep a job or can’t manage their lives, then they will be doomed to failure even if they have the cooking skills of Escoffier. This month and next month I am writing about how to teach your students to find a job.

I realize that it might seem an odd time to be publishing this article since for many of you the academic year just ended. However, for most of us, teaching our students how to find a job needs to be worked into our curriculum on a weekly, if not daily, basis. Below are five points to be included in your curriculum. The remaining five will be published next month.

Students want to be assessed. It appeals to their emotions and egos. Find ways to assess them beyond merely awarding a letter grade.

By Adam Weiner, CFSE

There is a Jimmy Buffet song called “Fruitcakes” that contains the line, “We all got ‘em, we all want ‘em. Now what do we do with them?” We might not want assessments, but we all got them, and the question becomes: “What do we do with them?” I submit that creative assessments can be used to inspire your students to levels they (and you) thought they could never reach.

Whether you teach in a rich suburb, an inner-city school, a nonprofit vocational center or the top culinary academies in the world, you will always have less-than-ideal students in your class. Because of physical, emotional or mental problems, because of upbringing, because of poverty or substance abuse, or because of a myriad other factors, you will have students who need extra motivation, who need extra inspiration. The purpose of this article is to show how assessments can be used to accomplish these two goals.

In a continuation of last month’s focus on teaching nutrition within a short class period, Chef Weiner explains how to emphasize the remaining six of 10 unchanging basic facts.

By Adam Weiner, CFSE

Last month I wrote about why culinary teachers find it challenging to teach about nutrition, and gave the first four topics to cover in a 50-minute classroom:

1. To lose weight, you must consume fewer calories than you burn (or burn more than you consume).

2. To be healthy, you must consume a wide variety of foods.

3. Generally, the closer food is to its natural form, the healthier it is.

4. Yes, Virginia, you really do need to have some fat in your diet.

This month we finish our list of 10 things to teach about nutrition.

March is National Nutrition Month. And as the general rules of nutrition keep changing, students are mentally tuning out. Here, Chef Weiner explains how to emphasize the first four of 10 unchanging basic facts.

By Adam Weiner, CFSE

Culinary teachers at all levels tend to be uncomfortable teaching nutrition because:

• we are expected to be experts in the field, but have spent very little time being trained about nutrition,

• when we started cooking, “healthy food” was basically food that people wouldn’t want to cook or eat, our students have heard so much about nutrition and obesity they mentally turn off when we start talking about “healthy,” and
• most importantly, THE RULES KEEP CHANGING. Just when I figured out how to use a “pyramid” they switched me to a “plate.”