Let’s talk about Chef Kenji Lopez-Alt. I have his cookbooks. But they mostly sit on my shelf. With all of my other cookbooks!
See, with a cookbook, I’m always a little unsure. Am I doing this right? Did the writer skip a step or am I just bad at reading? Why are there no pictures? There’s so much room for confusion and misinterpretation. Heck, the writer could also be making stuff up too! I can’t tell because I can’t see them doing the work!
But I LOVE Kenji’s YouTube channel.
It’s something else entirely. He straps a GoPro onto his head. You get to watch him cook the entire meal from his own perspective. I have no problem duplicating these dishes because, well, there’s nowhere for the nasty details to hide! No room for confusion. I can see him doing every single step. I can see when he makes a mistake and how he corrects it. Even a pro chef has to fix things along the way.
The cookbook hides those details – but they’re the key! The specifics matter. It’s where all of the trouble hides.
And so much teacher advice is even worse than a cookbook. You’re probably listening to someone TALK ABOUT teaching. Presenters naturally skip all kinds of details. That’s the nature of a talk. But you won’t know that there are details missing until you go to try the idea and realize that you don’t have enough information to work with.
What’s worse is, you have no idea if the person talking has even done the thing they’re talking about! You don’t know if the thing they’re talking about is even possible. I was a professional speaker for years. Believe me, it’s very easy to start embellishing things. To “borrow” other peoples’ ideas that sounded good in their talk. To start focusing on entertaining the audience rather than really making a difference in classrooms.
This is why I love Kenji’s videos. There’s nowhere for mistakes to hide. You can pause, rewind, watch it again and actually get better.
Any advice you give should be this specific. It should leave no room for confusion. There’s simply no substitute for watching a person do the thing for real. Most importantly, it shows you that the thing is ACTUALLY POSSIBLE and the person can ACTUALLY DO IT.