Qu'ils mangent de la brioche- ou du gateaux!

For those of you who don't know, the first part of my title is the expression from which we've derived the English "Let them eat cake." Brioche, however, is not the typical "cake" that we think of: sufficeth to say it's more kind of like sweet bread. "Gateaux" is the cake we would think about. If you're interested in the origin of the expression (it wasn't said by Marie Antoinette!) you can look here or here.

So when deciding what skill I want to teach someone (the learning portion of the project can be found here), the cake idea stuck the moment I thought of it for two reasons. Monday night, my FHE family came over to our apartment. As each group of roommates arrived, they all asked if something was burning. Why did my apartment smell this way? One of my roommates, Daniel, had tried to bake cookies- you know, those ones you literally place on the pan and put in the oven- and the apartment smelt like ashes once he was done. The other reason, of course, is that I would get to eat cake. An afterthought was that I could add in some cake-humor into my blog, cake humor having become popular in nerdy video games, so hopefully someone will get the references.

The Cake is not a Lie!

Teaching Daniel to make cake seemed like a dangerous undertaking, especially after his incidents with using the oven. But I felt pity for him eating Ramen noodles most nights, so I made his diet even less healthy.

I think I learned almost as much about teaching as Daniel did about making cake. For example, I learned not to turn your back on someone inexperienced while cooking or they may just drop everything listed on the ingredients list into the mixing bowl before you turn back around. Daniel learned that you put in your dry ingredients and then your wet ingredients. He also learned that despite having a hard exterior, eggs count as a wet ingredient.

I also learned a bit about improvising when you live in an apartment and don't have things like a normal mixing bowl- or a mother or grandmother to make cake for you. Daniel learned a bit about not putting in extra vegetable oil to make the cake more moist. He also learned that "water" does not mean "milk" so that the cake can be sweeter and that when you need "vegetable oil," that doesn't mean you can use "olive oil."

You Must Protect Your Cake!

I'm fairly confident that Daniel (sadly) could not have made the cake simply by following written directions. However, written directions could also not have taught me what I learned about teaching. When you tell someone to crack an egg and put it into the bowl, they usually understand this and have no problem making sure the yolk and whites get inside instead of the shell. But when you tell someone to stir something until there are no longer any lumps, questions as to what "lumpy" cake batter is versus cake batter that is "smooth" or "creamy-looking" or "well-mixed." You also learn that people use different tools for the same task, which requires things to be done differently: for example, you do not grease a pyrex pan even though you would grease some metal pans.

These things reminded me how people learn differently, especially when they're learning folk knowledge. People from different backgrounds and cultures, people from different geographical areas, people with different interests, and people of different gender learn differently from each other, and thus interpret the same written and oral instructions differently. That is one of the reasons folk knowledge is so important! Folk knowledge involves showing someone something, which is a more precise way of doing things. If, in our modern internet era, we try to learn everything online, we have no one to show us exactly what to do and how to do it, no one to answer our questions when we need them answered, and no one to point out when we're making a mistake! That is one of the reasons that learning directly from another person with one teaching the other (or both teaching each other) will never be replaced by high-speed internet: human-human interaction is the most direct and purest form of teaching, and therefore the most effective! I think the importance of human-human interaction during learning has been the main thing that I've gotten out of our folk knowledge unit. Let's celebrate- I've got cake!

You will be Baked. And there will be Cake.

In case any of you are wondering, the first and last images are from a game called Portal, and the middle is from a game called Minecraft, both of which use cake as a sort of running joke. There's also a picture I found of some guy in a BYU shirt with the Portal cake, but I don't want to put other people's pictures up on here. I hope you all enjoyed hearing about my project: I'm off to eat cake! :D