Kitchen Safety and First Aid Video Reflections

This video was the most fun to make! https://youtu.be/tUO3khzYB2I

Teaching this year has been a struggle. I have not been able to figure out effective ways to get out material to students. When they are not in the room with you, you never know what they are hearing and if anything that you are doing is helping. I have fallen back and regrouped so many times that I can’t count them. I have been teaching kitchen safety and first aid since my first year teaching. I talk through a PowerPoint presentation adding in lots of examples of injuries with the line, “not that I know that from experience or anything.”

  • For teaching about cuts, I tell the story of dropping a mini chopper blade and turning around to pick it up and ending up with 11 stiches in my heel and a smiley face scar that I have to this day. I tell about the time that I was opening a razor blade and taking the cardboard off of it and ending up cutting a triangle in my finger. I share the story of being early in culinary school and cooking dinner and opening a bag of spinach with my newly acquired 10 inch chef knife, affectionately known as baby knife, and ending up in the ER getting stiches in my finger. Waited about 4 hours for them to get to me, so that trick I show in the video about folding the paper towels to keep pressure on a finger, I know that works from experience.

  • For burns, I tell about burning my arm on my wedding cake because I was making it in the new oven in our apartment and hit my arm and hand on the element. (I had grown up with a wall oven, so reaching down into an oven was different.) We had to cover up the burns with makeup.

  • For falls, I share about a student spilling sugar on the floor and me bruising my whole leg because I slipped.

  • Thankfully, I have no personal experience with electrical accidents, but I do remember my dad being up in the attic and getting shocked through a screwdriver. There were some very funny noises up there. I also remember a lightening strike that hit the antennae at Mima and Grandaddy’s house and Mima being the only one standing. The current went across the room to her and we spent the evening in the ER. She talked about “the night the lightening struck” for years later.

  • For chemical poisoning, I tell about the day the Challenger blew up and I was a little over 1 year old. My mom stayed in the living room a second too long and came back into the kitchen and I had slid out of my high chair and had a white powder on my face and there was a Clorox 2 box on the floor next to the trash can. She thought I had eaten Clorox 2. She took me to the pediatrician and the ER. They gave me syrup of ipecac to make me throw it up and activated charcoal to absorb it. When we got home, Mama went in the fridge to get me a drink and the baking soda box was turned over. She realized that I had eaten baking soda and not Clorox. So all the drama was not needed.

The other categories of kitchen accidents, I don’t have personal experience with, thankfully.

When I was looking at teaching this section virtually, I realized that I desperately needed to change the way I taught it, since I will say things multiple times in class, and will still have questions. Teaching is much different when students have the option to turn your volume off completely. I was up the night before the new semester started with my mind going a million miles an hour and realized that I should turn it into a funny video. I must say that part of the inspiration came from the wide variety of accounts on TikTok that I follow that are just Baby Yoda figures being shaken around to music. Stupid, yes. A waste of time, yes. Able to entertain me for hours, definitely yes! So I decided that I would turn my Baby Yoda figure, (which I pre ordered in December of 2019 and it arrived in May of 2020) into a marionette and make the video. Later that week, I began to make props. I broke out the hot glue gun, my scrapbooking card stock, (which lets be honest, I’m never going to use for scrapbooking) a silver sharpie and some small scissors for detailed cutting. I had the most fun building and planning. I spent an entire Saturday morning into the afternoon filming and the rest of the evening until 11 p.m. editing. I haven’t ever had that much fun filming a video. I am very excited to share it with future classes.

Make sure to watch the video and subscribe!

Here are some links to things I used. These are affiliate links and help me out because I recieve a small commission!

Erin Mercs