I take a rather zen-organic-hippie approach to teaching. I admit I’m snappy at times and it’s usually when my students ask me the same question over and over, minutes after I explained it for the first, second and third time. I’m pretty patient, taking time to give those who need it one-on-one attention. I don’t yell, swear (or allow my students to swear) or call my students names like some of the other culinary instructors. So, when I do yell there is a good reason and it is unmistakable at whom my anger is intended. That’s right… my number one train wreck. Let’s just call him F-Train and it took four weeks of his careless ineptitude and structured laziness to finally make me lose my temper.
F-Train sauntered into class day one with a rolling suitcase, a rolling backpack, his knife kit, a puffy jacket that swallowed his petite frame and a black, graffiti-spray-painted baseball hat that he wore cocked to one side over his white kitchen skull-cap. His pants are always low, shoes dirty and I don’t think his patchy facial hair has ever seen a trimming razor. On Thursday nights, after class, he hits the clubs. (I know this because I asked my students what they like to do when they are not cooking… most replied spend time with family or play video games.) F-Train thinks he’s better and cooler then he is. After the first week, he asked me to email his grade to his mommy. I agreed to do so after the first exam which he failed and begged me not to because he no longer wanted mommy to know his grade. F-Train asks me pointed questions such as “is this the right answer” during written exams as if he expects me respond. I tell him to figure it out and he tries to bargain with me, trying to persuade me to give something away with a wry smile and a wide-eyed stare from behind his crooked, broken glasses. F-Train can best be described with a series of s-words… slovenly, slow, scruffy, spacey, sloppy, stained… he saunters through the kitchen with aimless direction, he slumps, rather than stands and is so scrawny that the corners of his floor sweeping apron not only meet but cross and overlap each other at his back. He’s no taller than 5 feet and can’t weigh more than 100 pounds. Teenage girls would be envious of his frame.
After weeks of only vegetables, starches, grains and eggs, we were finally blessed with whole chickens. I began my demo promptly at 6, like I always do and F-Train strolled in about ten minutes late, well into me tripping over my fingers trussing a chicken*, disrupting my lecture and class by announcing an apology as he dragged his bags behind him. I tried to talk over the noise of him removing his coat and digging around for his notebook. I managed my way through demonstrating a whole, trussed chicken roasted on a bed of mirepoix and served with natural pan gravy, breaking down a chicken into six, eight and ten pieces, cooking an airline breast of chicken chasseur with pomme risollee (a fancy french way of saying tourneed potatoes fried in butter) and a grilled boneless, skin-less breast that I served with a red-pepper, apple cider gastrique and allowed them to be creative in the sauce they made to go with it. I issued my standard advise on how to best manage their time, a quick review of chicken sanitation procedures which included a warning of being careful of cross contamination and making sure that they wear gloves while handling raw chicken, wrote what they needed to produce on the board, reminded them to ask questions, that I’d be moving around the room checking on each student and wished them luck.
I circulated through the room showing students up-close how to truss, begin the breakdown process or just checking up on their technique. Some of my students admitted to never breaking a chicken down before or not knowing which direction to tuck the wings. For the most part, they moved swiftly to get their whole chickens in the oven since they take the longest to roast and then moved on to breaking down chickens. I passed by F-Train’s station and noticed that he had taken slices off the chicken and not removed the breast like instructed. I gave him the quick lecture of how he wasted product, how he was potentially costing the chef at the least 6$, including his $2.33/quarter hour wage. “Is that a lot?” I explained how lucky he was that we had some missing students so he could get another chicken and I would walk him through how to do it. Again. I waited patiently while he went to go get his second chicken, I put on a pair of gloves, picked up his knife and showed him up, up close and personal how to remove the legs, then the breast and how to leave the wing in tact for an airline cut. I made sure he understood before I moved on to the next student calling me from across the kitchen.
I watched him from across the room for a while until my attention got pulled away. I cleaned up my demo dishes and began to put my equipment away when I saw him using gloves to handle the chicken, but then portioned out some herbs in to the spice container top with the same gloves on, then shook the herbs out of the top on to his chicken and was touching the top all over his chicken. Can we say cross contamination? Let’s just say we had a nice little chat about how he could potentially kill someone by being that careless which was met with a vacant stare and an even more empty apology. It was in that moment I truly knew what it was like to waste air. Later, I watched him move through the kitchen, making no less than 9 trips to and from his station to the stove, each time retrieving one item or another, not doing much more than wasting time.
As student began to bring me plates to critique, I noticed F-Train standing idly at his station eating so I asked if he was planning on presenting me his plate. This kid brings me his plate and casually tosses it in front of me and says nothing. “What is that?” … “Its my chicken” … “Where’s the rest of it?” On his plate (a paper plate, mind you) was a half eaten, albino looking chicken breast, with a bite of it still on the plastic fork he was eating from, no mashed potatoes or sauce or garnish or anything. I was gobsmacked… in shock that a student could be so utterly careless and show such a blatant disregard for following the instructions of that night’s demo. I was really just too shocked to say much more than “take that away” when I really wanted to fold him up and run him through the dishwasher. (That was strike two, for those keeping track)
42 other chicken dishes later, it’s time to clean up and usually a time of night when I hang back and point out things that missed a soapy, scrubby pad or broom’s bristles. I noticed F-Train just moving his items around on the work table, shuffling one item, then another. Not much different from a petulant child refusing to eat his peas and just moves them around to appear as if he/she is eating. It was already 10:30, the time we are supposed to be cleaned up, saying good night and hitting the lights for the day. “Are you going to clean up anything or are you going to just move things around and make it look like you are cleaning?” …. “I’m cleaning.”
I stood back, biting my tongue waiting to see what he was going to do next… he continued to shuffle his things around and very meticulously covered the whole roasted chicken he did manage to make with a bowl and snuck it under his table along with another plate he covered with a saute pan. Someone called from the dish-room, “Last call for dishes.” … “Hey, I asked you to get cleaned up, now get your area clean and your dishes to the dish room.” A normal student would respond, “yes, chef.” But ‘ol knuckle head over here decided to argue with me in front of the entire class, challenging me and pushing the proverbial buttons. And that’s when it happened… I raised my voiced, I yelled and heard students around him say “dude, shut the fu*k up and do what she says.”
“That’s it… I’m done. You have lost your privileges to take food home.” With that I grabbed his plates, his whole chicken and marched them over to the giant garbage can and dumped them in. I walked back over to him, tossed his dishes back in his general direction (much like he presented his first plate to me) and said, for the final time as calmly as I could to get cleaned up. During the exchange, I envisioned myself picking him up by his ankles and swinging him around over my head like a helicopter, picking up speed until I let go, hurling him across the kitchen, landing in the steam kettle where I would cover him with mirepoix, water, and a bouquet garni, closing the lid and cranking on high to let him simmer the night away. The rest of the class cleaned around him and quickly grabbed the offending items off the table as he stood there shocked. “Chef, was that really necessary?”
Yes, yes… it was really necessary.
*Trussing a chicken at home is easier than it is in front of an audience for only one reason which is you don’t have 20 people staring at you flub, tie and re-tie your bird at home. I’ll admit, I needed a visual to refer to during my yard bird trussing demo because quite honestly, I truss one bird a year and it’s usually about 12 pounds, covered in bacon and stuffed with onion, lemons, celery and herbs. On top of which, no restaurant I ever worked featured a “whole trussed bird” on the menu… chicken breast, pieces, or 1/2 a roti’d sure…. but none of those ever needed to be trussed. I’m not a trussing wizard, by any means.
Side note: This student came to me later (two days later) and apologized for his behavior, for back talking and being disrespectful, promised me that it would never happen again and that he would try harder for the remainder of the term. He held his word and passed my class with a decent grade. I heard through the grapevine that he is taking his culinary classes a bit more seriously working a bit harder.
