Table manners

On Thursday one of my students was putting on an extracurricular presentation about American table manners, and she asked me to be a guest speaker. I was given literally an hours notice, so I figured since I have (supposedly) been practicing proper American table manners for approximately 22 years now I could just wing it.

Her initial presentation was in Chinese, but fortunately one of my other students showed up and sat in the back translating for me. It was a great presentation as far as I could tell, except for a few tiny factual errors. First, she described the "American fourth course" (which comes right after the "American meat course") as the vegetable dish. Okay, I thought, maybe she is just referring to the side of green beans or broccoli that usually comes with chicken or steak. But then she showed a montage of various types of salad, including one of those edible fruit arrangements. This made me giggle a little. At another point she pointed to a really beautiful picture of a steak, and then called it fish. I’m going to have a hard time forgiving her for that one. Oh, and for some reason pretty much every photo of food she showed was of sushi. So I guess this lesson was more of the Japanese-American table manner variety.

To be fair, my presentation was certainly not perfect either. I may have accidentally said the fork goes on the right and the knife goes on the left, which was in direct contrast to what they had just been shown on the PowerPoint. I guess Home Economics in 7th grade really didn’t teach me anything. I talked about tipping, ordering at a restaurant, being a guest in someone’s home, not putting your elbows on the table, whether the boy should pay on a date… I was pretty much all over the place. But I redeemed myself at the end when I pulled a real live knife and fork out of my bag. It was like I had pulled out candy. Everyone wanted to have a go pretending to cut food. They went at it so enthusiastically it was a miracle a few fingers weren’t chopped off. Some even valiantly sacrificed parts of their notebook so their friends could actually cut something up. This didn't go so well, seeing as how it was just a butter knife.

Although I really shouldn’t poke fun at their fervor for cutlery; I’m the girl who is bringing home chopsticks for everyone as souvenirs…