After we lost interest in Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style, my wife and I drifted into the habit of watching Hell’s Kitchen with the chef Gordon Ramsay.
It’s an elimination-style, reality television show in which, in its current form, 16 people (eight men, eight women) compete as teams in various culinary tasks such as cooking for a bar mitzvah, identifying cuts of beef, and recreating complex dishes made from unknown ingredients.
Each week, the losing team must submit two members to be judged by Chef Ramsay. One of those members will be sent home — although Ramsay sometimes breaks the rules of the game by selecting someone who has not been put forward for elimination. Initially, the men and women are on separate teams but, as the season progresses, team members may be reassigned. When the original competitors are reduced to five, they are no longer team members and compete against one another.
The final episode involves the two remaining competitors creating their own restaurants and running them with help from previously eliminated contestants (not always the best ones). The final round is a comprehensive test of cooking skills, creativity, and leadership, and the winner is given an executive chef’s position in one of Ramsay’s many restaurants.
Rich, famous, standing well over six feet tall, and usually glowering, Chef Ramsay is an intimidating presence: a Marine-Corps drill instructor as culinary entrepreneur. Overcook the risotto in his kitchen, and you’ll find yourself battered by expletives like a hail of machine-gun fire: “You stupid, bloody, [bleep-bleeping, bleep-bleeper], CLEAR OUT!!!”
Contestants who survive several rounds of Hell’s Kitchen gradually stop flinching at these verbal assaults. They learn to say “yes chef,” repeatedly, when he lays into them. Toward the end of the series, his insults begin to convey a kind macho affection, like a friendly punch in the shoulder: “Don’t set the room on fire, you filthy pig-donkey.” Ramsay is often criticized for his overuse of the F-word — always bleeped out, pointlessly — yet there is a predictable, stylized charm to his reactions that has been captured effectively by the video-game version of the show.
Sometimes Ramsay will offer a tepid compliment, such as, “That was almost adequate.” More rarely, he’ll give praise: “That’s well done. I’d serve that in my restaurant.” The recipient of which then goes into ecstasies, speaking privately to the camera: “I thought he hated me.”
Hell’s Kitchen suggests that the most powerful and effective student-teacher relationships can have something in common with sadomasochism.
One thing about being an English professor is that you tend to consider almost everything in light of your profession. So while watching Hell’s Kitchen, my conversation with my spouse inevitably turns to Chef Ramsay’s virtues as a teacher, how he’s able to extract so much from his “students” without turning them against him.
The essence of his teaching method seems to be placing the quality of the food and service above all other considerations, including the feelings of the contestants, some of whom are humiliated on a weekly basis before an audience of millions. He is a figure of indisputable authority, and he doesn’t wrap criticism in a warm fuzzy blanket of reassurance. If someone serves a sloppy meal, he’ll call that person “a dirty pig” in a way that everyone will hear, remember, and, most important, learn from.
That is completely different from the way most faculty members in the last couple of generations have been trained to respond to students’ work. We fear hurting their feelings, alienating them, or provoking them into complaining to some higher authority. So instead of calling a student out, we respond with something like this:
“The absence of conventional spelling and punctuation in your paper — while something we shall want to address at some point — certainly shows an abundance of creativity. Self-reliance is a good thing to have, but you may want to use some sources next time, too. Overall, your essay demonstrates considerable promise for even greater success in the future. Good job! I’m so glad I had the chance to read your work. B+"
Surely that is not the way to produce more capable scholars. Instead of keeping our focus on the work — maintaining high standards as a categorical imperative — we contemplate the consequences: Do we really want to deal with being told that we’re “mean” and “unfair”? And then have to spend the next two months troubled by a brooding presence in the back of the room?
So our students learn only a fraction of what they might have learned if we had demanded perfection from the start instead of perpetually straining to praise the mediocre.
Ramsay sets high expectations from the beginning. In the first show of the season, the competitors are asked to prepare what they regard as their best dish. He tastes each one as the others look on: “Your scallops au gratin a la Abilene is disgusting. Bleeeech.” A moment later, after a reaction shot from the contestant, Ramsay might say, in his British accent, “Oh, God. I’m going to vomit.” He spews into a nearby trash can and wipes his mouth angrily, glaring, as the contestant — who had privately bragged that he was the best chef in Kansas — skulks back to the line.
An important lesson is being taught: The teacher is no fool, and he doesn’t work for you. He doesn’t want you to like him; you need to earn his respect. One might say that Chef Ramsay — like other fearsome reality-TV judges — is a warrior in the battle against snowflake culture.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term “snowflake,” then you probably haven’t been inside a classroom in the last couple of decades. Snowflakes are the products of educational and child-rearing practices aimed at convincing every child that he or she is “special,” as “unique and beautiful” as every flake of snow that falls from the winter sky.
Snowflakes seem to believe teachers exist to learn from them. We often hear that, too, in the rhetoric of teaching today; at the end of a semester, an eminent professor might say to her class, “I am so pleased to have had the opportunity to learn from all of you.” Snowflakes are trained to believe that they are doing their teachers a favor by just showing up. After all, everyone works for them: Their professors are no different from their hairstylists.
They will actually say, “I deserve an ‘A’ because I am paying your salary,” without any sense of having to hold up their end of the bargain. They do not regard their teachers as accomplished people; snowflakes have already achieved more. Everyone has told them so.
The snowflake has become so ubiquitous in academic life that there is even a blog (http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com) dedicated primarily to smacking them down, if only in anonymous fantasies, like letters to the Penthouse Forum.
Hell’s Kitchen includes a few snowflakes in every team; I suppose they are hard to avoid. In the current season, a contestant named Lacey fits the bill. She describes herself, without irony, as having had to overcome being a “pretty face” so that people would take her cooking seriously. In the initial rounds, under the pressures of the kitchen, she walked out and took to her bed while her fellow team members worked, causing them to turn against her. Ramsay moved her to the men’s team, and she seems to have changed once it became clear that nobody was going to accept her excuses. In addition to firmness, teamwork seems to melt snowflake behavior because peers are not bound by the ethic of dishonest flattery of the young.
Like tone-deaf wannabes on American Idol, the contestants on Hell’s Kitchen are forced to see themselves as others see them, and that can be like a painful conversion experience. They break down. They cry themselves to sleep. There is nowhere to hide; cameras are everywhere. They talk about quitting. Sometimes they lose their will to continue, and, if they don’t snap out of it, they are kicked off the program. It happens to seasoned cooks.
But sometimes there are contestants who are completely out of their league, yet they survive through many rounds because they learn quickly and refuse to give up. Hell’s Kitchen appears to show, on some level, that snowflakes know that their sensitivity is a pose.
Deep down, there is a stronger self that can be realized if only there is someone — and a set of circumstances — to force them, against their own inertia, to realize their full capabilities.
For teachers in higher education, Hell’s Kitchen is a fantasy about having the authority and personal strength to bring out the best in our students. It is, of course, not something that we can live in reality. (“Turn in a pathetic essay like that again and I’ll throw you out of here, you brainless sheep. Now piss off!”)
We cannot hold our students captive in a panopticon of 24/7 video surveillance, exposing their moments of weakness for criticism. We cannot kick them out of our classes for failing to live up to our highest expectations. We cannot punish students by making them gut squid or reward them with a trip to Le Cirque. We cannot promise them fame and fortune. We can’t even promise them a job. Moreover, our task is not to identify the “best” performer, but to improve the performance of everyone in the class.
The artificial conditions of Hell’s Kitchen provide Ramsay with a portfolio of motivational tools unavailable to most teachers. But his program does offer a much-needed shot of confidence in the ability of teachers to transform snowflakes into serious students by believing in the value of our disciplines and worrying less about what our students think of us.
It’s often said that the toughest teachers receive the highest evaluations. Hell’s Kitchen may not correspond precisely to the classroom, but Chef Ramsay’s approach — judiciously modified — might encourage some of us to take that leap of faith toward a style of teaching that demands excellence and that our students, beneath the surface, actually want more than inflated praise, permissiveness, and mediocrity.
Not that I recommend using the F-word as a pedagogical tool.
