Today I was one of four teachers from my school to attend  a workshop that followed up two days we had last August on “Quality Teaching in a Culture of Coaching.”  The presenter, Stephen Barkley,  was good.  The information was good, although a little too scattered to be especially helpful - especially the LONG and irrelevant role-playing exercise towards the end of the day.  But overall, it was okay.  There was one thing, though, that made the day just AWFUL.  Lunch.

First the only good part.  They had a big pan of baked potatoes.  Those were pretty good.  No salt or pepper was available, but I could live with that. 

Then they had salad to go with the potatoes.  The lettuce was so old that it was brown on the edges.  Not a little brown here and there.  Brown all over.  Very brown.  They had shredded carrots to add to the salad.  Again, freshness was not part of the plan.  Brown-tinged carrots did not add to the culinary experience. 

There was a grocery store less than two blocks from where the meeting was held.  Why not go to the store and buy some fresh lettuce?  What would that have cost?  maybe $20 worth of lettuce?  The salad was obviously stuff that had been prepared last week at least. 

And that was it.  Baked potatoes and old salad.  If the salad had been really good, that would have been an adequate lunch.  Not outstanding, but adequate.  It got worse, though.

Drinks.  They had a cooler of lukewarm soft drinks and water.  No Diet Coke.  No ice. I settled for a bottle of water.

Oh yes, they DID have dessert.  It was banana pudding.  You can’t mess up banana pudding, can you?  After all, there are just three ingredients: vanilla pudding, bananas, and vanilla wafers.  That’s it. One of the simplest desserts imaginable.  But no, these folks managed to totally massacre the banana pudding.  It had been frozen - the texture was strange - definitely not pudding-y.  And the taste was not banana-y.  I ate one vanilla wafer, sampled the pudding, and gave up on the rest of it.  Everybody around my table was tasting and trying to figure out what on earth was in it.  It was just weird.  And weird-tasting food is scary.

I can just imagine the caterers that morning:  “Hey, it’s a group of teachers.  They’re used to school cafeteria food.  Get out the bags of salad leftover from Christmas, and  get that banana pudding from last summer out of the freezer.  We can clear out all the old food today.  The teachers will be so thankful to be away from school for the day, they won’t even notice.”

After lunch, my stomach started rumbling, and I started popping Tums for the rest of the meeting.  I made it home with just a minor stomach ache.  I think I’ve recovered now, but my dinner was only yogurt - I don’t think my stomach could have handled anything else after that lunch.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 22nd, 2007 at 7:46 pm and is filed under Random Stuff, Teaching/Education, That's My Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.