Bloody school cookery!!!

[mrsshears]

DD has just announced that she needs all the ingredients for this for tomorrow,as i think is standard with most teenagers.
so we have just rushed to the supermarket to get everything,dd then produces the booklet from school which lists everything in ounces and pints etc erm i thought we were now working in mls and grammes ?? and then tells me i have to send a dish into school to cook it in and weigh out all the ingredients at home before hand! why the hell don't we just cook the thing at home!!! AIBU?

I could not believe it when I saw how they do cooking classes here. I went to school in Canada and when we did home ec (that was what it was called!) all the ingredients were at school in a huge pantry attached to the home ec class. The teacher gave us the recipe and we weighed out everything we needed and brought it out to the kitchen units. We had the class right before lunch too so we ate it there, no leftovers to bring home, plus we did smaller than usual portions so we weren't saddled with an entire cake! And this wasn't a fee-paying school, it was the Canadian equivalent of a state school. I guess we were extremely lucky with the funding the school got, but I was flabbergasted when I learned how it's done in the UK. Though it does look sweet to see all those cute baskets with the gingham lining being carried to school!

OP your child is my child! had exactly the same last night. Last week spent £12.00 on ingredients for some dreadful cheesecake. We never eat anything she cooks as we don't trust hygine......Hate the subject....ban it I say.

We pay £25 a year and that covers the whole years ingredients and makes it much easier and includes the dishes to take home.

DD yr8 gets some flexibility in ingredients. Ie they get the weight and then it just says meat or fruit and she chooses. Very rarely are the ingredients complicated, just what e might have in the cupboard. She buys and weighs everything herself and chooses her own dish from the cupboard.

Not sure what's wrong with this. It is what I did at school. My mother paid for the ingredients and I weighed them out at home. Letting you know late on the day before, necessitating dash to the supermarket, would be the only problem for me but as you say, typical for many teenagers. With the ingredients already weighed the lesson is about the actual cooking, not weighing, which is a skill teenagers would have acquired long ago (unless SN which I do understand)
quantities should be metric, though. I work in ounces etc by choice because I am very old

Oh ... and food tech is in the morning, so she eats it for lunch

I remember back in the 1970's when I did Domestic Science as it was called then, when decimalisation happened all the weighing scales, measuring jugs and measuring spoons were replaced by ones in grammes and millilitres, also the recipe texts. It was a steep learning curve, but we all managed it. The teacher said that 100g was roughly 4oz as a guide.

We used to weigh our own ingredients, brought from home at school in the lesson. We could weigh out at home, but that brought its own problems, i.e. when making pastry there was then no extra for the rolling out! I think that the odd failure can be beneficial, provided the ingredients weren't extortionately expensive. You do learn by your mistakes.

I also had a wicker basket! You learn very quickly that decanting stuff like fresh fruit salad into a plastic freezer box is a less messy way to transport it home! Make use of plastic carriers without holes in to put casserole dish in, and so on.

I was lucky in that I enjoyed cooking. I wholeheartedly support teaching cooking in schools, I think it is as essential as Maths, English and Science. So much more than just cooking is learned, budgeting the cost of ingredients, nutrition, use of leftovers, food hygiene, increasing/decreasing quantities for different numbers of people and so on.

I am so glad we never had to provide ingredients for dcs' school! We just pay them £10 for the term they do cookery and they provide all the ingredients.

Not a parent but as a primary teacher I completely understand why schools can't buy and organise food, unless you also want to pay a person's wages out of that. Not sure about now but when I was at school HE as it was then was an hour and you had to prepare, cook and wash up out of that and it was a nightmare. If schools provided everything, surely you would spend so much time giving out ingredients etc that nothing would get made.

I do cook with primary classes (have done so from year 1 up) and because it is not a regular occurence and I have time flexibility, I have bought the ingredients (either myself or claimed them back) and children have worked in groups to make something and then taken it home. Have made bread, pizza (dough and toppings) and sweet things. Usually I can squeeze cooking into curriculum in Maths or DT. However, it usually takes a good afternoon/morning to complete with a whole class doing it at once and me wishing I was an octopus with eyes in the back of my head!

Rambled away a little here, just feel that schools can't win - they buy ingredients and parents can't/won't pay, or ask them to bring it in, and parents complain. On the other hand, I do think ingredients should be readily available and notice given.

"If schools provided everything, surely you would spend so much time giving out ingredients etc that nothing would get made."

Didn't seem a problem at DC's school. Most of it never came home though because they ate it! They only did HE for one term in yrs 7 and 8.

I guess if only a small amount of children are doing HE you can work it out - ie 2 year groups for one term. Depends how long the lessons are and what you are making but I would rather children were making than hanging about (yes, I do believe measuring is important, hopefully children are doing this at home before bringing it all in).

I don't understand why it is such a problem providing your own ingredients, especially these days when people have such varied principles and budgets. Some people will want to buy quorn instead of chicken, some organic veg and poultry, some lactose free milk/butter, free range eggs as opposed to battery, and so on. How can anyone expect one cookery teacher to be able to sort all that out? Let alone how much of each type should be available for use at any one time. It's ridiculous.

Yes, dd forgot to tell what ingredients she wanted quite a few times. OK, dh (nutter!) got up at 6am to get to Tesco to get her stuff she needed because she'd forgotten until the night before and we hadn't got what was needed. Well, he didn't have to. She could have gone into school without and got a rollicking and maybe a detention from the teacher, and she would have deserved it. (And yes, the school know perfectly well which families can't afford to do it and take those children into account.)

We provided our own ingreidents, oven proof dish, and mixing bowl(!) when we did home ec about 40 years ago. Why not now? It's only a problem if you make it one.

When I was at high school ( 20+ yrs ago)we had to pay a nominal amount for cookery class but all ingredients were provided. We just had to have an appropriate dish to take the food home in.

I went to school in the 90s and we had to bring everything in measured. There would be no way that we would have had time to measure in class, they didn't even allow us enough time to cook what we made in class!

In the 5 years I was there, maybe a handful of items I cooked were actually eaten. There was not enough equipment for us to use so you spent a long time just waiting around for items to be free. We were told we had to use school equipment and not bring in items from home. Sometimes you only managed to make the item 10 mins before the end of the lesson and we were told it had to go in the oven even though it would take longer to cook. As another class would be in after us, we had to take it out of the oven after 10 mins and as there wasn't chilled storage it would be left on the side all day to be taken home and chucked in the bin.

Such a waste. 50 minutes was not long enough for a lesson. In such a short time we should have been making things that took hardly any time to do, that way we would have actually got to finish them.

ds is in S1 at High School and so far gets home ed 3 times a week - 2 days practical, 1 day theory. He has had both a cookery block and a sewing block. WE provide nothing except £1.20 for supply of ingredients and takeaway container. This is in a 1000 pupil school with 7 1st year classes.

I'm actually encouraged to hear kids still do have cookery lessons at school. I had heard it was all food technology and they just wrote about food, never getting any hands on experience.

At the DCs primary school, the cooking was done in small groups led by a TA. They looked at recipes and then the ingredients were allocated to individuals to bring, eg 100g grated cheese for one child, or tomatoes from another child. They cooked the dish between them, just before lunch, and the finished dish would be something they could eat for lunch. One day they had made lasagne. Seems an easier way to do it. One time the head teacher joined DD's cookery group to eat with them.

haggis, that's because they do it properly in scotland .

And they call it Home Economics which is so much better than Food Technology.

I loved cookery at school, but I was expected to get all my own ingredients together, and I had a weeks notice. You were given the list for next weeks lesson to give you time. I admit I sometimes forgot to mention something unusual to mum, but she always had all the predictable things in stock. If I did forget, it was up to me to go to the local shop and get the missing item, or fess up to teacher. She sometimes had some spares of some items if you paid for them. Also, there was always the shop across from school.

As others have mentioned, your offspring are being lazy for not doing their homework, i.e. preparing for next lesson.

We always did the measuring in class and I never remember time being an issue but then we had double period lessons so an hour and a half in total.

I was when a colleague was saying that her son was making spag bol in school and they had to provide ready made sauce!

I'm a Home Economics teacher in Scotland and we provide all the ingredients and the pupils weigh out in class (in 50 minute periods). It works, however you just need to be organised. Pupil's learn how to weigh/measure and collect ingredients from a trolley. Perfectly possible. Charge them 60p per dish and they bring their own container. We're not a small school either and cook once a week with s1/2 (180 s1's and 220 s2's) except when we do fabric and make things like real dresses and everything.

This is how it should be in my opinion. Pupil's love it.

FT

That's how it was when I was at school, food tech (also in scotland). I don't remember it being at all difficult to it in. Our periods were 54 minutes and we managed to bake cakes or make soup and wash up and everything.

I hated the sewing lessons in home ed though.

Food tech teacher here!!

Sad to hear parents wanting it banned.
Have worked in lots of schools with different systems.
Some supplied, part supplied, child brings it all etc
The best was a combination, we kept a sauce and spice cupboard for small quantities (oil, saffron etc)
Flour and tins for forgetful ones.
Lessons usually under an hour, so always a rush to get done on time.
Yes, I get students to share foods e.g. Fruit salad, each child brings two pieces, work in groups of four to combine prepared fruit and you have an amazing colourful end product.
It was home ec when I was at uni, no baskets though
Forgotten ingredients?? I used to staple a shopping list weekly into individual diaries so no chance they would forget.
Enough said, just saw this thread and wanted to have my say.
It's a great subject and most kids love it!!
(never used fresh pineapple for upside down cake, usually happy with any tinned fruit!!)