Daily writing prompts from June 9th, 2008 to December 31st, 2022
Thursday September 15th, 2022
The exercise:
Write something which takes place: in the classroom.
Head is very full. Was a good day though. The instructor is both knowledgeable and affable and it seems like a good group of fellow students to go through this with.
Hmm, sounds like everyone on your course wants to be there! That's really good news, and much better than I think I've ever managed on a course :) I hope it all continues this way, and that the remote part is just as good :)
The classroom It's been some years since I was last in a classroom. My editor has tried sending me to classes before: her first attempt, when she was still new and hadn't learned the difference between apotheosis and zeugma got her into some hot water after I corrected the lecturer every eight minutes for the entire day. He was dreadful, to be fair to me, and I could have corrected him much more often than that, but when I realised how many mistakes he was making it seemed more fun to set a timer on my watch and correct him on whatever he was saying when it went off. He saw the lesson out, but on his way home he reportedly snapped and assaulted a traffic warden with a pencil and half of a wooden ruler. It was a good six years later before she tried sending me to another class, and she didn't tell me what she was up to etiher. The idea, apparently, was that I review the cookery classes in place of the usual restaurant review, as a change of pace. However, I turned up late, had to break up a fight between the Blonde and the teacher over polyester aprons and the coat that Coco Chanel died in, and things got worse from there. But my editor is not one to be deterred by the visible errors of her ways, so I'm off to another cookery class. This time it's a high-end thing; I'll be the only student and the man teaching it has spent nearly forty years living in some remote region of Portugal studying mushrooms and now teaches an eye-wateringly expensive course on how to cook fungi. The last time I saw prices this steep was at a little farm near Vancouver where they taught their fruit and vegetables yoga. I had arrived to discover, rather worryingly, that I would be staying in a room in the house of the teacher. Tea that evening was beige mushrooms in an earth-coloured sauce that tasted largely of earth. In fact, if you'd closed my eyes and asked me to guess, I'd have said I was being expected to eat lumpy mud. And spat it back out. As it was, I discretely spat the food into the bin, excused myself for an evening constitutional, and found the local McDonalds. The first lesson did not start well: I was told that the reason the course was a week long was that we would grow our own mushrooms as well, but when we went out to the mushroom shed (it has a mushroom cellar beneath it) and looked at the bag of compost I was struck by how similar it looked to a body-bag. When I mentioned that the teacher turned pale and decided that mushroom planting could wait, and hurried me back into the classroom. Ah, the classroom. Freezing cold with views of the Atlantic from the windows and a feeble gas-stove that couldn't produce enough heat to compete with the stiff sea gale coming through the windows like an SUV driven by a football-mom on meth. The teacher set a pan of water on the stove to boil, and half an hour later I could still immerse my hand in it without discomfort. I left when he announced he would be cooking lunch, which would be some kind of raw truffle stuffed with a truffle farce. And naturally I tipped the police off about his mushroom growing. There are much better restaurants to get corpse-mushrooms from, and I shall be reviewing a few next week since my editor's way of apologising is to increase my expense account.
Greg - yeah, I don't think it's the sort of thing you go into without really wanting to do it. I think maybe one person mentioned that earning the certificate would directly lead to a pay raise - most everybody else is doing it in order to either do their jobs better or to get ready for their next job.
This was rather delightful. Appreciate the reference to a certain small scale farm. And... I think I would like to hear more from this... writer? Critic? Whatever. More, please.
2 comments:
Hmm, sounds like everyone on your course wants to be there! That's really good news, and much better than I think I've ever managed on a course :)
I hope it all continues this way, and that the remote part is just as good :)
The classroom
It's been some years since I was last in a classroom. My editor has tried sending me to classes before: her first attempt, when she was still new and hadn't learned the difference between apotheosis and zeugma got her into some hot water after I corrected the lecturer every eight minutes for the entire day. He was dreadful, to be fair to me, and I could have corrected him much more often than that, but when I realised how many mistakes he was making it seemed more fun to set a timer on my watch and correct him on whatever he was saying when it went off. He saw the lesson out, but on his way home he reportedly snapped and assaulted a traffic warden with a pencil and half of a wooden ruler.
It was a good six years later before she tried sending me to another class, and she didn't tell me what she was up to etiher. The idea, apparently, was that I review the cookery classes in place of the usual restaurant review, as a change of pace. However, I turned up late, had to break up a fight between the Blonde and the teacher over polyester aprons and the coat that Coco Chanel died in, and things got worse from there.
But my editor is not one to be deterred by the visible errors of her ways, so I'm off to another cookery class. This time it's a high-end thing; I'll be the only student and the man teaching it has spent nearly forty years living in some remote region of Portugal studying mushrooms and now teaches an eye-wateringly expensive course on how to cook fungi. The last time I saw prices this steep was at a little farm near Vancouver where they taught their fruit and vegetables yoga.
I had arrived to discover, rather worryingly, that I would be staying in a room in the house of the teacher. Tea that evening was beige mushrooms in an earth-coloured sauce that tasted largely of earth. In fact, if you'd closed my eyes and asked me to guess, I'd have said I was being expected to eat lumpy mud. And spat it back out.
As it was, I discretely spat the food into the bin, excused myself for an evening constitutional, and found the local McDonalds.
The first lesson did not start well: I was told that the reason the course was a week long was that we would grow our own mushrooms as well, but when we went out to the mushroom shed (it has a mushroom cellar beneath it) and looked at the bag of compost I was struck by how similar it looked to a body-bag. When I mentioned that the teacher turned pale and decided that mushroom planting could wait, and hurried me back into the classroom.
Ah, the classroom. Freezing cold with views of the Atlantic from the windows and a feeble gas-stove that couldn't produce enough heat to compete with the stiff sea gale coming through the windows like an SUV driven by a football-mom on meth. The teacher set a pan of water on the stove to boil, and half an hour later I could still immerse my hand in it without discomfort.
I left when he announced he would be cooking lunch, which would be some kind of raw truffle stuffed with a truffle farce.
And naturally I tipped the police off about his mushroom growing. There are much better restaurants to get corpse-mushrooms from, and I shall be reviewing a few next week since my editor's way of apologising is to increase my expense account.
Greg - yeah, I don't think it's the sort of thing you go into without really wanting to do it. I think maybe one person mentioned that earning the certificate would directly lead to a pay raise - most everybody else is doing it in order to either do their jobs better or to get ready for their next job.
This was rather delightful. Appreciate the reference to a certain small scale farm. And... I think I would like to hear more from this... writer? Critic? Whatever. More, please.
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