As students and teachers walk down the tech hall, they smell different kinds of foods cooking each week. These delicious scents are coming from consumer science in Mrs. Bakeman’s room 218.

Mrs. Bakeman is the high school and eighth-grade consumer science teacher. Mrs. Bakeman teaches at the high school in the morning then comes to the middle school at one o’ clock. Consumer science is not available for sixth or seventh grade.

According to Mrs. Bakeman, Mayfield Middle School has been teaching cooking classes for a very long time–even before she got there.

Mrs. Bakeman’s class cooks a variety of foods throughout the school year. According to Mrs. Bakeman, her sixth and seventh period classes have already made several different recipe. “They’ve done pizza pockets, cookies and they did some French toast. They did some zucchini bread; they did some quinoa stir fry.”  Out of all the foods her class cooked, Mrs. Bakeman thought the hardest for her students to cook was a mashed potato casserole.

While this may seem like a lot of food already, Mrs. Bakeman’s classes still have many recipes to try in the near future. The students are going to cook pumpkin bread trifle, and the students will do a big cookie exchange. Cakes and do a two-minute mug recipe are also planned.

While Mrs. Bakeman is teaching her classes, she hopes her students will gain important life skills. She hopes her students will learn how to measure accurately, understand cooking vocabulary, and read and follow instructions correctly.

Depending on whether she’s teaching the middle school or high school, there are some major differences between her approach to teaching. She usually guides her middle school students through instructions. She also needs to break instructions down for her students so everyone can work together since her students at MMS aren’t as experienced as the high school students are. She says her high school students get to be on their own more and need less guidance.

After all the hard work is done, the dishes washed, and the food finished baking, the students finally get to eat their products. Most of the food the class makes is very good, according to one student, Ofelia Yeghiyan. Ofelia is an eighth-grade student who joined the class because she loves to cook and wants to learn more about cooking. Ofelia says none of the food the class has cooked has been bad; she liked it all, even despite burning her bacon in a recent recipe. But she did have one favorite food: sugar cookies.  When the class ends at the semester’s close, Ofelia said she’ll definitely miss one thing: the free food.