The Naked Chefs – Master Teaching

There will be some who will doubt me, and others who will boo and hiss, but I need to get something off my chest: let me write it out loud, I prefer Jamie Oliver to Nigella Lawson! Nigella may be the Domestic Cooking Goddess but Chef Jamie is my Kitchen Commando. Nigella may have breasts to die for but Jamie sears chicken breasts to live for.

There are many reasons to love Jamie:

• He is a bash and belt kind of chef who cooks in handfuls
• Every recipe of Jamie’s that I’ve cooked has come up trumps
• He helped transform 15 (and then many more) down and out young folk with his 15 Restaurant concept
• He took on unhealthy English School Dinners and won
• He took on regional Italian cooks broadening their taste buds and lost
• He is tackling unhealthy USA school lunches and it may kill him
• He is the pin up boy for Kinaesthetic Learners – people who love to learn by moving, bashing, belting, doing and getting their hands dirty

Now, I am well aware that a lot of my reasons for loving Jamie will be the same reasons why others do not like him. One person’ s puree is another person’s pure pain in the ‘A’.

In fact, the second favourite on my list of the top 10,000 Celebrity Chefs on the Planet is someone who is a virtual opposite to Jamie – Delia Smith. Where as Jamie is ‘a handful of this and a splash of that’ kind of cook, Delia is all precision and perfection. Jamie’s favourite subjects at school probably would have been Playtime, Home Time and Home Economics. Where as Delia most likely excelled at Mathematics and Chemistry. Yet, these are the very reasons why I love her too:

• Her recipes are exact
• She doesn’t talk down to you when describing how to boil an egg
• What you see is what you get

Compare that with British Celebrity Chef Gary Rhodes. Gary is magic to watch. His creations are more architectural delights than plates of food. His desserts emerge as Arc De Triumphs or Eiffel Towers and they are beautiful. Yet what I see with Gary is not what I get when I attempt his recipes. Suddenly the Arc De Triumph is the Fart De Triumph and the Eiffel Tower of Caramel is a Woeful Brown Lump. Maybe the mistake is that I do not have the light, cool hands of Celeb Chef Rhodes or maybe it is because of my hair. You see; Gary Rhodes has a haircut that resembles his desserts; all lacquer, spike and gelatine. I am sure he practices the styling on his head before transferring it to the plate; where as the hair I have left is a buzz cut, need I say more?

Before Gary Rhodes hair, prior to Gordon Ramsey’s vocabulary, pre Masterchef Television, before Jamie Oliver, or predating even my Grandmother’s cooking, the most famous cookery writer in British History was Mrs Beeton. Mrs Beetons’s Book of Household Management is often referred to as ‘Mrs Beeton’s Cookbook’ given that 900 of its 1,112 pages contained recipes.

These days Mrs Beeton’s legacy lives on and has become a Celebrity Brand. Most people who have heard of Mrs Beeton probably picture her as a Grand Motherly Type woman. However the sad truth is that Isabella Mary Beeton died in 1865 aged 26 after the birth of her fourth child. Yet, her celebrity brand lives on.

If there was a cooking style for Mrs Beeton it may have been:

• Practical
• Loving
• Scone like

If there was a cooking style for Gary Rhodes it could be:

• Visual splendour
• Elaborate
• Crockenbush like

For Delia Smith:

• Precise
• Perfect
• The ideal poached egg

For Jamie Oliver:

• Hands On
• General
• Everything all in one bowl

Now, with all that diversity, imagine yourself teaching a class of these Celebrity Chefs:

• Two Fat Ladies in the front row
• An affable Bill Granger next to them
• A foul-mouthed Gordon Ramsey in the back corner (trying to crack onto Nigella)
• Peter Gordon in the middle mixing everything together
• Peta Mathias wanting you to be far quirkier and
• Young Kylie Kwong preferring more spice

Meanwhile, class comedian Jamie can’t respond to anything in print and needs every lesson to have Hands–On learning as the major component.

Just as every chef has a unique style, unique preference for flavours and individual processes of cooking, so does every student have unique preferences for how they learn any content, especially content is a NAC Task - New and Challenging.

To teach well is to reach well. We as Teachers need to have diverse strategies that engage learners through their strengths. Then we need to have each learner use their strengths as a starting point to develop some of the areas that are holding them back.

You can reach a Jamie like student through using a Hands-On physical modality of learning and then utilise this mode to help him approach some of the things he doesn’t like – his reading and writing. (Jamie Oliver has often stated that his dyslexia makes him a virtual non-reader. If I had a young Jamie in my class I would grab exciting bits of cooking magazines and help him learn the print by mastering the recipe, then guiding him to stories about chefs and cooking. Think BIG and build small – one kaizen at a time.)

Personally I would have loved teaching a young Jamie. My first ever Principal when teaching, Glyn Watkins, told me to ‘fall in love with the tigers’ and explained that a Tiger was student who would stretch you as a teacher and get you to find other ways of engaging learning. Jamie was a Tiger.

And I love Jamie Oliver now, not just because he wants us all to share a love of good, natural, healthy tucker and not just because Jamie teaches us that we can be celebrities in our own kitchens. I love him because my wife Lindy was fortunate enough to go on stage with Jamie as part of his Happy Days Live Tours in Australia and she vouches for his natural ways. Personally I think he was a champion in not feeling threatened when sharing the stage with one of the greatest cooks on Earth – my wife Lindy.

So, there it is; Learning Styles emphasise that we have different strokes for different folks, different starting styles for different apprentices; different leanings for different tastes.

Teaching really is the work of the Master Chef.

Glenn Capelli new book Thinking Caps is available in Australian and NZ stores and on-line at www.glenncapelli.com