Part Two: The Micro-teaching

After the interview, I was booked to prepare a thorough but need-not-to-be-too-extensive micro-teaching demo for a class of thirty students, and I had a week to do so. Preliminary, I was given a specified topic as to what I’d be teaching about and mine was about taking orders from guests in a five-star restaurant environment.

Initially, I was told that my teaching duration would take about one and a half hour, and I was expected to write a lesson plan of how the students would learn the topic effectively. Powerpoint presentation was a must, as well as some internet research, but I was told not to get too overwhelmed because the students and the academic director as well as the senior teacher would understand that I wasn’t familiar with the company’s procedure in serving their guests. On the other hand, they wanted to see how my teaching would be effective to the students.

So during that whole week I surfed the net and looked for instructions, information, details and processes on waiting tables and taking orders.

You’d think that taking a guest’s order would be easy. Wrong. There were so many steps that in the end even I felt that if I were the student, I’d definitely feel quite frightened to know that it wasn’t as simple as it looked.

I tried to discuss things from as many aspects as possible; customer’s service meaning professionality in how the server groomed and presented himself, on how to hand out menus without looking as if he was hovering around, on how he introduced himself to the guests and upsell one of the dishes in the menu but without being so pushy, of how to handle guests who wanted special orders and how to take the orders of more than five guests in one table, and last but not least, the importance of avoiding saying “I don’t know” under any circumstances.

But in the end, I realised that spending too much time on the presentation would not be effective. So I took a lot of pages out from my presentation, compacted it more and got rid of the tiny, unimportant bits. I typed little footnotes at the bottom of each pages in light grey instead for me to explain along as I’d go from one page to the other.

I used some scenes from Ratatouillé, but only the relevant parts. I thought it would add a nice touch to the students to get them interested. Plus, I loved that movie to death – I think it was a terrific and heartwarming movie which I could watch over and over again and still wouldn’t get bored of it.

The next thing that I prepared was a menu. I wanted my students to do a little role-playing to make sure they understood the lesson, so I prepared some mock-up menus for them to use, as well as a special Cheat Sheet which contained the most common questions and replies a server could say to their customers.

The Cheat Sheet was my fiancé’s idea because he said that if he were a student, he’d be pretty pleased if his teacher gave something that he could use in the future. So I made it and the next day I went to the photocopier to get the whole thing copied and cut into four squares that each could easily fit into a person’s wallet.

I told Rima about the whole Cheat Sheet thing, even sent the JPEG file to her so she could have a look and she said, “There were some grammar mistakes here and there, though. But it’s up to you if you want to fix them, they’re nothing major!”

I looked at the already photocopied pages desperately, and hesitated for a moment until the perfectionist side of me told me off, “You still have time, correct it! Put a little bit more effort, goddammit!”

So I ended up printing eight pages of the Cheat Sheets and cut them in four sections myself. But I was relieved to know that this time there were no grammar mistakes! Can you imagine a teacher with grammar mistakes? And all this was happening on the last night where I was supposed to be getting over my nervous feeling! Luckily I followed my fiancé’s advice to time myself while doing the presentation, so that I’d still have enough time to do the role-playing thing. Even if I didn’t get the job yet, there was no harm in a little time-management, right?

At last, the day finally came for me to do my micro-teaching in front of the thirty students. And such was my luck because I happened to feel quite nauseaous that day. I drank some of my mother’s coffee the night before (which she made out of the left-over drying-up coffee powder she found in the kitchen) and I suspected it was too strong for my liking, my stomach immediately started acting up. So as well as feeling restless from lack of sleep (because of the coffee) and wanting to throw up every fifteen minutes (because of the coffee) I seriously thought I was going to puke right in front of the students.

But fortunately, things went well. I got there at 12:00 pm, and my micro-teaching started at one o’clock, so I ask for a permission to enter the classroom early just so I could install my presentation and check things out, just in case.  The classroom was empty when I got there, but as I was busy installing things, a student came in (still with the same uniform from which I saw them the first time; long-sleeved shirts, bow tie and black pants and shoes) and he looked quite confused. I smiled at him, and then another one came, and another one and so on until the whole class was full with about thirty students who were looking at me intently as if I was this strange exotic creature from Venus (you wish).

I thought I’d better make some conversations rather than keep quiet and make things uncomfortable – they’d be my students for the next one and a half hour, after all! So I started introducing myself and made little chit-chat with some of them, and they were very friendly and polite (even up to a point of being slightly flirty), and that was relieving.  I had to excuse myself to go back downstairs so I could inform the senior teacher that I was ready to teach. She told me that I could start without her, so I went back upstairs.

As soon as I opened the door, all of the students stood up immediately and greeted me enthusiastically. I swear, I nearly had a heart attack. Never in my life were there that many men in one single room who looked so excited to see me. But that set me off in a good mood, so I started by getting the students to introduce themselves, and was quite surprised to know that eighty-percent of them came from Bali.

The micro-teaching went well, and the senior teacher and AD came in after about half an hour later, and something terrible happened.

As I was babbling about, my mobile rang. The students went quiet. I really wished someone would laugh instead but they went absolutely rigid. And it wasn’t helping either that I had my Bob Marley’s Jammin‘ ringing tone on. Already paranoid thoughts were running across my mind; Omigod, my students would think I took marijuana on a daily basis, I had a boyfriend with dreadlocked hair and we’d get totally wasted on the weekends, I grew marijuana crops secretly on my backyard, I had contacts with the mafia and so on and so on. Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit there.

But I reached for my mobile immediately and turned it off – it was my mother who called me! – and I apologised profusely. My heart was beating so fast but I tried to keep my cool. I had to finish this thing off, and whatever happened, happened!

I was right about including some scenes from Ratatouillé, though. The students loved it, and some asked me to play one scene over, and some who hadn’t seen the movie were curious about what the mouse was doing inside the chef’s toque – including the AD, surprisingly! – in which I ended up explaining about the mouse controlling the chef’s body movements by pulling different strands of his hair- I even had to pull strands of my own hair to make them understood what I was saying.

The senior teacher and the AD left as I was assisting the students with the role-playing activity. I felt a bit disappointed and scared that I’d failed because of the whole mobile phone incident.

After the whole thing was finished, the senior teacher called me to have a private conversation to talk about the job, the commitment I had to give and whether or not I’d be able to deal with the time management, and the whole teaching thing.I gave my best reply which was my most sincere, and then she told me that she’d let me know whether or not I’d get accepted by next friday.

I went home feeling relieved but also anxious. The hardest part was over.. but now all I had to was wait. And there was nothing else I hated doing than waiting for the uncertainty.

Actual event happened on March 11th, 2009.