The sweet, warm, welcoming, occasionally burnt aromas, can be smelled as it fills the halls leading to room 135. The class where it is normal to make mistakes and set the smoke alarms off.
After teaching at Tekama Herman for five years, Macy Pinion is almost halfway through her first year of teaching at GHS. She taught seventh grade and up about relationships, sewing, child development, a housing class and foods class in a school filled with preschoolers to seniors.
“I am the second of four, and I was always helping my siblings with homework,” Pinion said. “I was always interested in working with children in some way.”
Pinion said she originally thought that she wanted to be an elementary school teacher, but after nannying in college, she quickly realized that age range was not meant for her. She transferred from UNO to UNL after discovering that being in a primary grade setting was not her dream anymore.
“On my transfer day, they talked about family and consumer science,” Pinion said. “I love cooking and my mom was a big sewer, so I would sew growing up and I was like, ‘you know what? I think that is what I actually want to do.’”
In the class, students are taught about a topic that involves food or nutrition and how it impacts the body. They then will learn how to make that food and how to acquire healthy eating styles into their day-to-day life.
“I love it, I think it is so important for kids to have real-life applicable stuff,” Pinion said. “It is very easy to take this and apply it directly to your daily life. Not that math and English are not real-life skills, but I am just taking what they [teachers] are teaching in math and applying it to their daily life.”
Pinion said in her class, students use knowledge from other classes and apply it in cooking. They use math for measuring, English for reading recipes and science for creating and experimenting with the food.
“I took this class because I thought about being a chef, but scratch that. I do not think I could make it the right way most of the time,” senior Alexis Cerone said. “But I have learned simple meals I can make for college and the right foods to eat to stay healthy.”
Cerone said that her favorite part of the class is lab days where they get to make and eat the food. Her favorite thing so far that they have made are calzones, which are dough pockets stuffed with meat and veggies.
One day in class, the students had to convert a chocolate chip cookie recipe to different measurements. Some students got frustrated while trying to figure out the recipe. Some students’ cookies turned out not how they were supposed to, and Pinion recalls it as both a fun and enlightening day in class.
“We learn about the topic, quiz over it, find a way to identify it and then we practice it in the kitchen,” Pinion said. “The kitchens are our labs.”
The food class is different amongst the others, where it is very normal to mess up often. It is not just a class that students take for fun, it is a class where they walk away with a life skill.
