Reflections

A home-style design on the 1959 book.

Teaching students privately is a dual-edged sword. On the one hand, you tend to get a better quality of student who is diligent, more personable, and more goal-oriented. Teaching such students is several cuts above the dead-eyed, lifeless experience of teaching in fast food English conversation schools which are quite often catch-alls for people who have to study rather than a large group of people who really want to.

One of the two books my student has (from 1961), with whimsical artwork.

On the other hand, there's a lot more time spent in preparation for such students which is off the clock. While you don't have to do extra work for such students, depending on their specific needs, you really should if you want to give them a good lesson. However, there's often something in this extra preparation for the teacher if she approaches it with the attitude that learning for the sake of the student is also a form of learning for the teacher.

As I mentioned in a previous post, one of my students wants to be a journalist and she wants to write about Betty Crocker for a lifestyle magazine. To that end, I've been investigating Betty Crocker cookbooks so that I can help her (hopefully) develop an article that will be accepted at some point. Since she's particularly interested in the '60s books because of their style, I've also been researching what are considered the hallmarks of 1960s style.

A book from 1972 with rather funky text (reflecting '60s psychedelic style).

Doing this has actually been more difficult than one might imagine since the focal point of most articles is on the psychedelic and drug-based counterculture of the late '60s and not on more mundane aspects of domestic life among the non-hippie generation. While those elements were certainly a big part of the '60s, there was also a strong thread of transition from the '50s leading into the early '60s that tends not to get any attention, but you can see it reflected in the items targeted at housewives throughout the decade. Also, a lot of what is considered '60s style is actually early '70s style.

A book from 1980 which is starting to see a cleaner look, but still using relative bold text elements.

Most interestingly though, by looking at the covers of the cookbooks and the titles, you can actually make a very good guess as to when they were made. The style of the era is reflected not only in the artwork, the photographic style, and types of dishes, but also in the fonts used. You can see a definite trend from somewhat plain with country or home-style designs with a bit of a flourish to overly-stylized to sophisticated in the text styling and layout. There's also a transition from a focus on entertaining and catering to guests in the book's titles to a focus on faster meal preparation for the family that reflects the changing roles of women from the '50s to the '90s.

White tends to be used more in the most modern layout styles as it has been accepted as more of a use of space for design purposes rather than a byproduct of not wanting to do full color printing. This book from 1996 reflects that.

I'd like to persuade my student to make the article she's writing about either the way the books reflect their times in terms of food, style, and women's roles, but I believe she's fixated on the two cookbooks she has and the artwork in them. The main problem with this is that I'm not sure there's enough to say in this regard, especially after I had to disabuse her of the notion that those two books represented the entirety of "Betty Crocker" styling throughout the decades of the company's release of cookbooks. If nothing else, I now have a deeper understanding of why her original article was rejected. The suppositions she made and the claims she asserted were simply based on too little research and a lot of erroneous conclusions.