Cooking: the found recipe

Tutoring high school subjects, you learn about teenagers. The tutor tells a story about a recipe he found.

On a late-July day in 2013, walking around Robron Centre with my kids, I saw a photocopy lying on the deserted pavement. I knew at once it was a kid’s assignment, cast off with the school year that had ended a month earlier. I picked it up.

I guess there hadn’t been much rain since school had let out. The photocopy was in good condition, somewhat browned from the sun. It was a recipe, likely from a foods class. The title – Apple Coffee Cake – led into a description of the muffin method. The page had neither date nor name. In neat pen, much neater than my writing ever was, the student had answered all the questions following the recipe.

I decided to keep the recipe; I told my kids we’d make it at home. Not immediately, but sometime that fall, when school was already back in, we did. I’ve made it a few times since; my family likes it. The recipe is pinned to the fridge.

I’ve always wondered why the student, having completed that assignment, never handed it in. Likely, by now, they’ve either graduated or are just about to. Do they recall that recipe, that day in foods class, at all?

A teenager’s life is often more complex than an adult’s. Priorities can change invisibly, hour by hour. That’s how you end up with a carefully completed assignment, deserted in a school parking lot, never having earned any credit.

Let’s get those completed assignments in, people:)

Jack of Oracle Tutoring by Jack and Diane, Campbell River, BC.

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