Gobsmacked about daughter's food tech lesson

[dottybooboo22]

I've just been informed by dd that she's cooking next week in her food tech class. I have to buy the ingredients. I don't mind that but then she said they have to practise at home so they'll be able to make it in class
She then got all stroppy when I pointed out that it would cost twice as much for the stuff and wasn't it the whole point of the lesson to teach them how to make it??? Am I missing something here?

Interesting. I've always seen it as my job to teach my kids how to cook. The school/teacher is a bonus.

My mum taught me the basics and the rest I picked up over the years. I expect my kids to be able to cook reasonable meals by age 16. I would expect my child to have researched what she is going to cook have the ingredients and prepared up front so it's not a disaster. Why wouldn't you practice at home? We practice spelling and times tables and read at home so why not cooking?

I can think of a few reasons why leaving it to school would be a better idea:

Cost - a family might not even have the necessary casserole dishes, etc. and some can barely afford one set of ingredients, let alone enough to prepare two dishes, one at home and one in school.
Mess - not everyone has the energy after work to supervise or clean up themselves after a teen.
Time - not everyone has an afternoon to help a child cook, and not everyone wants to or can spend a few hours after work in the evenings doing it either; some families have younger children or things going on. It's not always possible to find a time slot for supervised cooking.
Lack of expertise on the part of the parent - not everyone would know if a student was doing it all wrong or if an end product was ok. You also find families that have their own ethnic dishes who would be unable to help much with evaluation of Irish Stew, for instance. For the same reason, most parents are not going to be the ones teaching algebra, trigonometry or calculus, or geography, or chemistry, or even English Lit.

I think people whose parents have been able to teach basics are luckier than they realise. I am among that group.

I live in HK. where 90% of HK. people have live-in maids so even the parents don't know how to cook. They just get the maids of all work to do it along with other chores and tasks such as getting children to/from school, shopping, looking after pets etc. Some families keep maids even the children are practically adults.

Plus, Hk. being what it is, 99% of parents would not "valuable" lesson time to be "wasted" at school in cookery lessons when their children could be learning how to pass exams instead. The kids would as likely as not be taken to one of the trillions of extra-curricular centres to "learn" cookery instead.

Because, as we all know, mastering English grammatical exceptions and rules is much more imperative than being able to feed and care for yourself.

Mine gets taught to cook at home, its a basic life skill, so why the hell would you expect it to be the schools job to teacher her that

I would have a big problem with cooking meatballs though & DD would be horrified as we don't eat meat

& agree it sounds odd to have to practice at home

Teaching kids to cook at home is great, but in that case you would surely not want school cookery lessons at all as they'd be unnecessary, too simple etc. If your child has been making simple meals and baking since toddler good and is a dab hand in the kitchen, but you are on a tight budget, you'd resent buying ingredients for them to cook something they could make blindfolded and that will go to waste as it won't be enough to feed the family and won't be stored properly til it gets home, or that you don't like eating as a family etc.

As some people teach their kids to cook at home but others don't even know how to cook even simple dishes themselves it is always going to be a bit of an unsatisfactory bodge teaching cooking as a "life skill" at school, but useful for those not aught at home hopefully.

In my opinion they recommend this, but they cannot possibly force you to have to buy ingredients twice. Obviously, if she is feeling comfortable cooking it at home first, then it is her you have to please, not her food tech lessons.

I reckon schools are being asked to do too much. They would be better off sticking to their knitting and teaching children core subjects. I just checked up on my old school's website and see they teach "citizenship" and "business studies" for Chrissake. The former strikes me as a form of indoctrination when done in schools, and the latter strikes me as something more suitable to the sixth form. As for cookery, well yes, schools should teach it if their role is to be an extension of social services rather than just, well, schools. Children from families that like cooking will do it at home anyway, those who aren't probably won't learn anything useful at school, particularly given some of the odd things children seem to learn in those lessons.