kiwicarioca-esl

As a chef, and an ESL teacher whenever pos­sible I like to integ­rate food, recipes, and food ety­mo­logy into my classes. Let’s face it every­one eats, but not every­one cooks. So, teach­ing cook­ing and Eng­lish makes good sense, right? Not only do stu­dents learn the vocab­u­lary of food, but they also learn about the ori­gin of foods, and how food integ­rates into the culture. 

The recipe below, is a bacon and egg pie recipe that my Mum, and many Mum’s and Dad’s from all over New Zea­l­and and Aus­tralia know, and love. It’s not elab­or­ate at all, but that’s why it’s so popular.

It’s easy to pre­pare (maybe 15 minutes) and cook, and intro­duces some use­ful verbs, like sprinkle and dot to lan­guage learners.

The great thing about cook­ing and Eng­lish les­sons is that a stu­dent can prac­tise mak­ing the dish after class. Thus rein­for­cing the pro­cess, and link­ing the verbs to an action. Oh, and then they can enjoy the food of course. A big bonus.

What I’d like stu­dents to do is leave a recipe, via voice or text. A recipe that their Mum makes, or a home made recipe that is linked some­how to the cul­ture of their home, or city.

Please share this voicethread. I’d like to get as many coun­tries around the globe as pos­sible. The 10 best recipes will receive free classes online with me. 

So, giddy up, write a recipe, and leave it on the voicethread. Many thanks.

Well, in my pre­vi­ous post (which you may or may not have read) I was talk­ing about mov­ing my pod­cast to this site. Easier said than done.

Over the past week I’ve been try­ing to nut this out, and have been driven quite balmy by the entire ordeal.

If you go to the itunes sup­port file labelled ‘chan­ging urls’ they offer a simple set of instruc­tions to change the url’s, and you’re lead to believe that the entire pro­cess is indeed pain­less. Even for new­bies like me with lim­ited patience for com­puter code, script, tag’s, rss feeds, and the like. 

But alas it is not pain­less, indeed quite the oppos­ite. You see the link they provide never works. I must have tried in excess of 50 times, won­der­ing each time..‘what is the prob­lem here’, or ‘they must be over­loaded’, and ‘but this is a pro­fes­sional com­pany, surely they know what they’re doing’. But, any­way, it seems they don’t.

The altern­at­ive solu­tion provided by the linked screen, says “if you don’t have any luck con­nect­ing to this link (they know) then try con­nect­ing to the itunes store’. Right, well at least they provide an altern­at­ive one summises.

So, off I tottered to the itunes store, and under the pod­casts head­ing began my search for ‘sub­mit­ting a pod­cast’, or ‘adding a pod­cast’ or ‘pod­cast regis­tra­tions’ link. Some­thing, any­thing that might give a clue as to where to head next. But, alas noth­ing. Indeed the mighty iTunes web­site is a labyrinth of left and right turns, back­tracks, deadends and blind alleys that lead abso­lutely NOWHERE.

So, next I watched a video about how to change url’s with itunes, and was lead down the same dead dan­delion path. The video was old, and things had changed. So, what to do? Of course!!… I need itunes sup­port (why didn’t I think of that earlier?).

But, hang on a second. I for­got about nav­ig­a­tion rules imposed at the itunes website. 

1.Make it almost impossible to loc­ate the itunes sup­port sec­tion, and thus reduce the expendit­ure deal­ing with cus­tomer sup­port enquiries. 

2.Answer every pos­sible ques­tion that a cus­tomer could ever ask and include it on the web­site so that the doc­u­ment is so long and com­plic­ated that the cus­tom­ers will be too exhausted to ever want to con­tact us. 

3. Offer a link that doesn’t work, ever, that sends cli­ents right around the twist, so they never try to con­tact us.

You think I’m exag­ger­at­ing don’t you? Well, my chal­lenge to you is ‘go and find the itunes sup­port email address, in under half an hour’. No, to be fair I did loc­ate it within the half hour time frame, and with ecstacy flow­ing though my veins I dot­ted down my con­cerns in an email.

Within 24 hours upon check­ing my inbox I saw the words ‘itunes sup­port’ and grasped at the email. Unfor­tu­nately, the email was a stock stand­ard reply say­ing ‘go to the itunes sup­port page, entitled ‘chan­ging urls with itunes’ and fol­low the instruc­tions. Oh, dear…my worst nightmare.

Well, it was blatanty obvi­ous, whomever or whatever sent the email hadn’t read my tra­gic story of des­pair or had simply chosen to ignore it. And this is my point. 

One would have thought that a mega­lith of the com­puter world would have given more thought to the way in which they respond to cus­tomer enquir­ies. Don’t you think? After hours and hours of search­ing, utterly exhausted I decided to send them an email only to be fobbed off, and sent pack­ing to where I’d come.

As a human’s name was attached to words in the itunes email, I shot off a terse response explain­ing my dis­ap­point­ment and dilemma once more. Again, the response was stock stand­ard ‘thankyou for your enquiry, we do appre­ci­ate your con­tact and we can assure you we will do everything we can to assist you…blah, blah, blah’ but then below all of this hog­wash were the words…‘I did read your email and I’ve sent it to another person’. 

Great, I was mak­ing pro­gress. Another few emails later and I finally began a con­ver­sa­tion with a per­son. Yes, a real per­son, with thoughts and feelings. 

If you com­mand the title of ‘thought lead­ers in the 21st cen­tury’ wouldn’t it make sense to chan­nel some of that thought in to sup­port­ing the people who are keep­ing the till filled with cash. I’ve been com­pletely put off by the entire exper­i­ence, so I’ve pur­chased a Skype world plan which gives me 400 minutes a month to call these machines, with names. Should we accept robotic replies? I find it intol­er­able, and I’m sure I’m not alone.

So, ‘world’ get out there and fight these megalith’s and call them on Skype, nag them, cre­ate havoc for them until they under­stand ‘cus­tomer ser­vice and sup­port’. Sup­port doesn’t mean ‘fob off’ it means ‘help’ and genu­ine help, not a par­lance of dirth dis­guised as ‘care and con­cern’. It’s unac­cept­able, intol­er­able and it’s got to stop.