Teaching is like cooking...

It's quite an interesting comparison:

1. The ingredients should be trimmed into manageable, edible chunks to ease consumption and digestion. (Except in the case of flashy fish or meat dishes, or a whole roast turkey, but they'd eventually be cut or sliced to put on smaller plates)
2. The appearance of the food is a key factor to attracting people to eat it. Dressing it up and arranging it nicely won't hurt.
3. Different people have different sets of taste buds. There's no one dish that suits all.
4. Always be ready to adapt your recipe to available ingredients.
5. Sometimes you have to put away your pride as a chef and remember that spontaneous decisions will affect the enjoyment of your food. Always be ready to add salt or pepper or any other condiments to cater to the consumer's taste, or maybe have a backup potato salad for the occasional vegetarian.
6. However good you are at cooking, there's forever someone out there that you can learn from to make yourself better.
7. You could try out new dishes, but too much radical changes in the dishes over a short period of time might put people off.
8. To be a good cook, one of the prerequisites is that you are passionate about cooking.

Last but not least, you can memorise a whole cookbook and be able to recite it from memory, but what counts is that you DO carry out the act of cooking, and that will help you get better at it. Don't worry if you fail at first, as a failure is just another step towards success.

~失败乃是成功之母~