I Spoke too Soon

Phase 2, Week 1, Day 2

Boy, if I was every wrong about something, this may have been it. I’ve waited several days to write this post because I was not sure how to handle it. With each day that passed, things got worse. We’ll just say I have a personality conflict with the 2 chefs that teach my regular class. The problem is, I’m not the only one. It seems that about half the class has a personality conflict. I’ve decided not to name them here because I don’t want to implicate them. They may have outstanding chef credentials but it is evident they maybe teaching in the classroom is not their forte. We’ll just call them…. Ava and Adolph (thanks Jeremy L). I hope I don't offend anyone. It's more of a coping mechanism than anything.

As soon as I walked in the room, the boys were on me complaining how much day one sucked. I thought it couldn’t be that bad, right? We started off with a lecture on stock in which Adolph had a student, Rachel, come to the white board and be his “Vanna” and write the lecture notes for him. Ok, weird, but no biggie.

We broke into small groups and made fish fumet (fish stock). Things when along pretty well until Ava and Adolph began contradicting each other on some simple directions for the class. This caused a bit of frustration for students when we began to do something as instructed only to be given contradicting directions a few minutes later. Ok, again, no big deal. But definitely a different working partnership than our last class.

After cleaning up, we had a quiz over Le Cuissons and the mother sauces and their thickeners.  AHHHH!!!! What’s with the pop quizes on week one!? But I survived, only to have Ava drill the answers into our heads for the remaining 30 minutes of class. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention this class is 30 minutes longer than last phase. Awesome.