Powered By Blogger

Saturday, 19 July 2014

CHEF.TEACHING HOW TO COOK






By David Monyebodi
During her mid primary school years, Hlokota would gather kids (her peers and younger) around at her house after school hours to share some knowledge with them and the other way around.

Initially during her career decision there were two careers she had conceived in her mind; becoming a dietitian or a teacher. However, her second option became a reality. Having had done hotel keeping and catering at high school became advantageous to her decision making on studying towards hospitality studies which she studied for four years. She’s been a lecturer at an FET college since 2008, where she teaches hospitality studies. Teaching, motivating, guiding, assessing and facilitating students is her job and she believes that dedicating more of her time to her students “makes it easy to work with them” and they understand her even better as much as she does with them; given the fact that people have their own differences regarding their backgrounds and or their nature of understanding. Hlokota never wanted to work at basic education level schools but prefers higher education instead as she believes that the course demands more resources as it is too practical and at tertiary institutions the facilities are mostly available than at basic schools.

Despite the fact that they are at a training centre, her students take their learning seriously and professional as they are able to secure huge offers at professional level; where they are able to cater for big and small functions, both within and outside campus for ministers and or private and government officials. The support and understanding she received from her mother during her studies encouraged her to become even more persistent as the road was not smooth at all, more especially their mentors were so negative and discouraging back in the days. Today she has turned things differently from what she used to get, she encourages her students to never lose hope no matter what challenges they may come across. In 2011 and 2012, Hlokota managed to raise a bar by scoring 98 and 100% pass rate with her students in the subjects she teaches.. “I have a very supportive husband” she said, which she believes is a good thing and would do justice to her passion.

Like any other field, hospitality is very broad and one can branch into other professions within it and it is forever growing and the education system has come to the recognition of the constant growth and need for it to be equivalent to varsity level. Other related careers that one can pursue within the field are; hotel management, entrepreneurship (depending on one’s experience) just to mention a few. Hlokota’s advice is that one should dig deeper into their goals before making any final decisions as they may discover a lot more to their aspired goals and see things differently

No comments:

Post a Comment