By B.C. Manion
It’s 9 o’clock on a Thursday morning and students are streaming into Miriam Cohen Humphrey’s classroom.
They’re chatting as they sit down, but as Humphrey begins to talk, the students settle down to listen.
She tells them what’s on tap for the day.
Half the room will create a menu for a restaurant with any theme.
“Think about what we talked about this week about how menu items are described,” she reminds them.
Attention to detail is important. The menu must include three appetizers, three soups/salads, three entrees and three desserts. It must include a description of each item and its price.
Students are not allowed to copy the name of any existing restaurant or its menu items.
She tells them to give their restaurant a new name, not one that’s already in the market.
“Come up with your own unique spin on these. Think about current trends.”
While some students get busy on this assignment, the other students troop into the kitchen.
They know the drill.
They grab aprons, take out their recipe and get to work.
Today’s assignment: Make macaroni and cheese from scratch.
The chore involves locating the proper cooking pans, grating cheese, boiling whole-wheat pasta and making a creamy cheese sauce.
Once the cooked pasta and cheese sauce are combined, a member of each team spoons a portion into an individual serving tin. A sprinkling of grated cheese goes on top of the macaroni and the tins go into the oven for a quick broil. When the dish is finished, the containers are pulled out of the oven and the students sit down to eat their pasta.
All of this happens within 50 minutes during the Career Discovery Culinary 1 class at Martinez Middle School in Lutz.
In today’s cooking lab, the focus is on learning to work together as a team, which means dividing the duties to make sure everything gets done on time, said Humphrey, recently named the Outstanding Middle School Teacher of the Year by the Hillsborough Technical Career and Adult Association.
Humphrey knows about being a team player, according to a profile put together for the awards program.
Besides giving students a wide range of opportunities, she also has helped new Family and Consumer Sciences teachers and has allowed new teachers to shadow her.
She’s also written exams and exam reviews and currently is developing county curriculum for her course.
In the classroom, she runs a café for her advanced culinary students. She’s also partnered with Steinbrenner High, to give her students a chance to see “a day in the life” of a high school culinary student.
In a quest to help the entire school, she has written articles highlighting good foods to eat before taking a test.
Before becoming an educator, Humphrey did catering and banquet work at several resort hotels.
She thinks that background has helped her to know what skills her student need to possess to get a job in the hospitality industry.
Being able to work on a team is critical, she said.
“That’s what happens in a true kitchen. You don’t have one person creating the entire meal. You have a line cook over here, making the rice. You have a line cook over here, making the meat. You have a line cook over here making the vegetables and they bring it together on one plate and send it out.’’
Learning to work as a team can be a hard lesson for middle-schoolers, Humphrey said.
Some may want to boss others around; others may want to talk with friends instead of completing their tasks.
“Even the best of friends can be the worst teammate. I tell them this all of the time,” said Humphrey, who did not picture herself as a teacher while pursuing her bachelor’s degree at the University of South Florida.
Initially, she majored in voice performance.
“My passion in life was music. My mom was involved in it, too,” said the Wesley Chapel woman, who is married to Joe Humphrey, a teacher at Hillsborough High and associate editor of The Laker/Lutz News. The couple has a 3-year-old son, Andrew.
Humphrey learned a lot about cooking from her mother.
“She was always in the kitchen, or teaching music. It was one of the two, so I always felt kind of connected to both,” she said.
Unfortunately, her mother passed away about a year and a half ago, Humphrey said. Teaching students to prepare foods from scratch is, in some ways, therapeutic, she said.
After getting her undergraduate degree in communication, Humphrey worked in the hospitality industry, doing catering and banquets. She loved the work, but not the hours.
At the same time, she’d become very interested in nutrition.
Her husband mentioned she might want to consider teaching, since schools offer nutrition and food prep courses.
“Somehow, it all fell together,” said Humphrey, who landed a job at Martinez Middle and completed the district’s Alternative Certification Program.
She’s been teaching at Martinez for six years and has had some of the same students for three of those years.
They know their way around the kitchen and operate Café 409, which makes snack items and provides goodies for school events and occasions, such as Administrative Professionals Day or Teacher Appreciation Week.
Humphrey teaches students how to make their favorite foods — such as tacos, pizza, baked ziti and cake — from scratch.
“If I brought in a box of cake mix, I’m not actually teaching them how to bake a cake,” Humphrey said.
By preparing fresh, instead of packaged food, the students can use natural ingredients and skip the preservatives. They also can make healthier versions of foods they enjoy.
For instance, her students make tacos with chicken, black beans and corn.
“A lot of the kids, when they first saw the recipe it was like, “Black beans! I’m not doing it.”
But when they tried it, they liked it.
Students said they enjoy Humphrey’s teaching style and were pleased to see her work recognized.
“She’s very patient,” said 14-year-old Taylor Perez, who has been in Humphrey’s classes for three years. “She always has something fun to do.”
“We learn a lot from her. Everyone shows a lot of respect for her,” said student Alyssa Furr.
“She helps you understand,” added Lexi Crocus, who along with her classmate, Samantha Swanson, won first place in the cookie jar baking competition at the Florida Strawberry Festival. The girls made nine different kinds of cookies for their cookie jar, and provided a recipe card for each.
Humphrey enjoys helping students feel comfortable using kitchen tools.
Some arrive at her classroom never having used a can opener, or an oven.
That’s no big deal to Humphrey. She shows them what to do.
When working with sixth-graders, she goes step-by-step. She gives her more advanced students more complex assignments and greater latitude.
But she keeps an eye on them.
“I’ll stop them if I see an error about to happen,” she said.
She’s vigilant about safety, too.
Humphrey said she’s going to miss her eighth-graders when they move on to high school.
“When you have kids for three years, they want to be here. They want to do a good job. They want to impress you and do amazing things. I don’t have to try to coax these kids to do anything. They just jump right up and go, “Yep, we’ll do it.”
“I think I’m going to cry when these kids leave.”
