Things I have taught, explained, built, demonstrated, or dragged into a room so people could understand them better.
Practical teaching materials from kitchens, studios, conference rooms, community spaces, and the occasional room where the real job was helping people stop being intimidated by the thing in front of them.
This is the shelf for classes, talks, handouts, and demonstrations that do not quite belong in a glass repo, a food app repo, or a TPM template repo. The common thread is teaching. Not teaching as performance. Teaching as translation.
Some of this material is polished. Some of it is old. Some of it was built for one specific room on one specific day, which is how a lot of useful teaching material gets born. Dates matter. Links rot. Product recommendations age. But the shape of a good explanation often survives longer than the tool list.
cooking/knife-skills/- Underground Food Academy knife skills class from January 18, 2009. Knife safety, station setup, chef's knife basics, dice sizes, and the small miracle of putting a wet towel under a cutting board before someone discovers physics the hard way.
talks/pasteurization-boiling-booze-saving-humanity-mostly-by-accident/- A Louis Pasteur talk about wine, beer, milk, microbes, pasteurization, vaccines, and the recurring historical pattern where someone tries to solve one practical problem and accidentally changes the world.
Each teaching item should have its own folder:
area/topic-title/
|-- README.md
|-- source/
| `-- original-files-go-here
`-- notes.md, outline.md, handouts/, or whatever the thing actually needs
The README.md tells the story: what the thing was, who it was for, what someone should learn from it, and what needs to be fixed before teaching it again.
The source/ folder holds the original files. That keeps the artifact intact while letting the repo explain it in plain English.
Use these lightly. The point is clarity, not bureaucracy.
- Active - still useful as-is or close to it.
- Working - useful, but needs cleanup before being handed to people.
- Archived - preserved for history, reference, or reuse, but not current advice without review.
Old teaching material is not embarrassing. It is evidence.
The knife skills handout still has useful bones: stay safe, set up your station, hold the knife well, keep the board stable, practice the cuts. The equipment links and product recommendations are old enough that they should be checked before anyone treats them as current buying advice.
The Pasteur talk has a strong story and a good room-energy premise. It also has claims that deserve a source pass before being used in a formal science or history setting. Comedy and accuracy can live in the same room, but only if accuracy gets its own chair.
Earlier projects like the EEG feedback machine can live here later if there are notes, photos, diagrams, or enough story to make the artifact useful. For now, this repo starts with teaching materials that already have source files and a clear path into folders.
That is enough. Start with the shelf you can actually label.
