Life lessons in a tortilla
Cooking classes return to Marion High School
Staff writer
Shannon Cooper admitted losing a little sleep last week before teaching her first Marion High School cooking labs.
Making salsa was on her lesson plan — and, ominously, it involved handing out knives to 15A lively teenagers.
But, a 26-year teaching veteran of every level but kindergarten and fourth grade, Cooper is a master of controlled chaos and needn’t have worried.
“No one cut themselves,” Cooper said later, sounding relieved. “It went so well.”
The next day, she was back at it — helping students make tortillas they could dip in their salsa.
But in this class, a tortilla is not just a tortilla. It’s a life lesson for students in negotiating adult life: feeding themselves, spending wisely, working with other people, learning from mistakes, and cleaning up after themselves.
After two years without a teacher of what a generation or two ago was called “home ec,” Marion High School has revived cooking classes in its family and consumer sciences program. In registration last spring, the classes filled up immediately with a diverse mix of those who actually work in food service, those who are expert bakers at home, and those who admit to disasters like pouring beef broth into a strainer.
Marion is on trend: Nationally, the Family, Career, and Community Leaders of America student organization reports its membership spiked 26%, from 197,882 in 2021 to about 250,000 today.
The decision to offer the courses was all about Cooper’s willingness to get certified to teach it.
Last spring, her daughter, a Marion junior, was about to enroll in an online cooking course for school credit taught by a teacher at Hillsboro High.
“I asked our principal, ‘Why is that class online?’ And he said we don’t have a teacher to teach it,” she said.
Cooper buckled down, studied for two months, and took a certification exam for family and life skills.
She called the test a “random” tour of anything life could throw
at you: everything from the differences between dice, chop, and julienne to child development theory, interior design, and sewing.
She passed, enabling Marion High to offer cooking classes this semester and next.
Cooper may have aced her certification, but she knows cooking classes don’t always involve ”correct answers” as much as they do mistakes as part of the learning process.
She tells a story of her own foible in a high school cooking class.
“My lab partner and I were making peanut brittle, and I melted the spatula into the peanut brittle,” she said. “You know, I am not an expert chef. I make mistakes. I’m a messy cook.”
Sometimes, she said, success just takes confidence to bushwack through a recipe with what tools you have.
The class tortilla recipe called for one-third cup of oil, but class members’ measuring cups had a two-thirds mark, so Cooper instructed the students it was OK to gauge by eye what half of that would be.
And, she illustrated, sometimes safety isn’t totally obvious — like that students started to smell a natural gas odor. A knob on a stove in one of the classroom’s five kitchen labs was turned on, but there was no flame. She turned the knob off and fanned the air before relighting the burner.
The tortilla-making class was a step-by-step gauge of a veteran teacher. Her command and control over a swift 48-minute class was impressive.
She divided 15 students among 5 kitchen labs and directed them with knowing humor and tips, squelching slow-downs and detours with expert directives.
Students mixed flour and oil into dough that was then rolled flat into tortilla shapes and flipped into pans, cooked, and plattered. Then there was counter cleanup of flying flour dust and wash up of dough-encrusted bowls and utensils.
It’s “tricky” to keep the class on the rails, she said, but she made her job look easy. And students thought she made the class easy, too. They also see its importance.
Junior Riley Thomas hopes to work on his family cattle farm someday and can already grill a thick steak. But he won’t be doing that at college, he said. He needs this class to “learn how to cook for college and so I can make more than ramen and stuff.”
Also hoping to expand his repertoire, sophomore Wesley Warnica, who thinks he might work in food service, said he’d been cooking since he was “old enough to sit at the counter.” But he’s mostly made banana bread to help his aunt who sells it at local markets.
The class may be an elective, but junior Britton Foth, of the beef-broth-in-strainer incident, saw it as a requirement “because I need to work on my cooking skills. My mom doesn’t let me cook.”
As students unveiled their first homemade tortillas, there was some severe critique of their indeterminate geometry — squares and undulating edges.
“That’s exactly what they’re supposed to look like,” Cooper assured the room. “They’re not going to be perfect circles like store-bought ones.”
The proof of that was in a quick end-of-class taste testing as students dipped their crisp tortillas into their salsa and … liked it all.
The final Seinfeldian words of wisdom Cooper delivered as students swarmed around the dipping counter: “No double dipping!”