Educator of Excellence

A call to help brought Amanda Matdies from teaching home school to public classrooms.

“I just felt God was saying, ‘OK, quit helping just your kids. There are a lot of kids that could use more help.’ And so I went back to school for that,” she said.

Matdies just finished her second year as the family and consumer sciences teacher at Whitefish High School after teaching for four years at Flathead High School.

She was recently awarded the Educator of Excellence award for Montana ProStart, a national career technical education high school program developed by the National Restaurant Education Foundation.

The award goes out to educators who “demonstrate excellence in the classroom and passion, commitment and creativity in all aspects of the ProStart program to help their students make the most of the opportunities that ProStart offers,” according to Monica Miller of the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation.

Nominations come from the state restaurant association, students and former students, and submissions by the educators describing significant achievements.

Matdies was honored at the Educator of Excellence Award dinner in Chicago in May, which included a walking tour of Chicago’s best restaurants. She was one of 41 educators nationwide to receive the award.

Matdies likens the ProStart program to an AP or advanced placement culinary class similar to what students might take in other subjects as they ready for college.

“It’s career tech education,” she said. “So that they can be trained and even if they don’t want to go on to higher education, they can go into the field with a good set of skills.”

Matdies teaches both the level one and level two ProStart curriculums in her baking and cooking classes at the high school. The classes are popular – she said she averages 120 students in each semester of baking and about 80 for cooking.

While the classes are harder than most other introductory culinary courses at other schools, Matdies said the ProStart curriculum is all about career readiness. It’s also a challenge her students have been glad to take on.

“They want active learning, they say, ‘Teach me more and more.’ So I just think this program works,” she said.

“If they’re going to learn, why not let them learn with a real vocabulary? So instead of saying, ‘Oh, I need to pre-measure everything, you’d say mis en place, which means get everything in its place, laid out like they would in a restaurant. They’re learning the same things, but they’re learning it with the industry in mind so they can transfer those easily,” she added.

The ProStart program at the high school is off to a superb start.

Last year saw two recent graduates, Emma Claire Spring and Alyssa McLeod, reach the ProStart nationals for restaurant management and this summer four of Matdies’ students — Kyiah Ingraham, Alysha Wagner, Baileigh Krause, Robert Bertlesen — will head to Big Sky a culinary camp in August.

She’s also excited about future projects in her classroom, notably an ambitious cooking show production made by students Ingraham and Ian Caltabiano.

For Matdies, teaching her classes is about offering the valuable practical skills that can be used by anyone at any time in life.

“Nothing against math, nothing against English and all that, but I wanted something that had a lot more versatility to it,” she said. “You can teach about families, children, human relationships, interior and fashion design, culinary, tourism — it’s broad, and I really like that.”

Matdies said it’s also important to keep things light in the classroom. Culinary studies shouldn’t be too serious, she said, and the best way to keep students interested is to spice things up a bit and have some fun in the kitchen.

“Let’s not take it so serious, unless you want it to be serious. That’s a big part of how I teach. They’ll get enough of that in college, I think high school should be trying new things and seeing if you like them,” she said. “I’m a goofball, to be honest. I don’t want it to be so serious that the students feel inadequate. They don’t realize they’re learning advanced stuff because we’re laughing so much.”