Why I started Mixing with Mercs

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March 13th, the last day I had kids in my classroom. We left that Friday thinking that we would be back on Monday with at least a little time to say goodbye. We didn't get it. That Saturday, it was announced that schools across NC would be closing for at least 3 weeks. We haven’t been back yet. I had such wonderful classes in the Spring Semester. They were so much fun! We spent the rest of the year between being bored and drowning in work. We had to switch to full remote overnight and never really contemplated what that meant. We just survived. We went into summer not knowing what the next year would bring and packed up our classrooms that up to that point had been a time capsule of what life looked like before COVID. Student work still on the walls and remnants of lunch boxes and water bottles that would never be retrieved. 

We looked forward to the next year having no idea what it would be like, but knowing that there would be at least some element of online learning whether hybrid or full time. I teach Foods and Nutrition and was going to begin teaching Food Science, a class I have wanted to teach for years. I was going to be teaching a class I had never taught before, potentially fully online. We got later and later in the summer and we were on a seesaw of will we or won’t we. We finally found out on July 23rd that we would be fully remote for the first 9 weeks of school. So I started planning. I knew I would need a way to do “labs” online. I knew I couldn’t get close to a classroom experience, but I was going to try. Family and Consumer science classes are, by nature, very hands on. I usually do 1-2 labs per week, so accomplishing the learning achieved by those labs was going to be almost impossible. I was also going to be fully on a screen competing with every other screen in their house, and let's face it, I’m not near as interesting as Netflix. I did my first couple of weeks of classes to get a feel for what they needed. Food science was painful, even for me. I can’t imagine what my kids were thinking while I was getting bored actually doing the demo. Waiting for items to bake or waiting for a temperature to register was as exciting as watching paint dry. I also was drowning doing set up and then had a massive mess to clean up between classes. I knew that once I started Foods 1 demos, it wasn’t feasible. So, as all good teachers do, I fell back and regrouped. 

I had been thinking about starting a YouTube channel for a while, but hadn’t done it. I hated seeing myself and even worse, hearing myself on camera. But, I also am a massive consumer of cooking videos. I am an extremely efficient person so I can’t stand massive lead ups to punch lines and seeing cooking videos that have a 20 minute explanation before you even get to the recipe. I also don’t really care for cooking videos promoting specific recipes. If you have a cooking video for one recipe, you know how to make one recipe. If you make a cooking video that shows the science and method behind it with hints for substitutions within it, then you are learning. It's the whole “teach the man to fish,” thing. So you won’t see me posting recipes because with the internet, you can find a recipe for anything you want to make. I want you to see a recipe that you want to make and then find the techniques and methods on my page. 

Short story long. The goal of my page is to teach my students, but if the general public can benefit from my videos, I would love it. 


https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWXmQxY5wxUumXQLFqTZLYw/

Subscribe to the channel here! I would love to have you!

This is the camera Equipment that I use for my YouTube videos. 

Cell Phone holder for tripod: https://amzn.to/33MKy1V


Erin MercsComment