It has come to my realisation that being a teacher is a tough job – especially when I’m assigned as the person of contact in which I have to be responsible for the students’ progress. It might all sound very academic, but as I get to know my students one by one, I become quite attached to them.

The first week is usually the toughest. The students will have to adjust themselves to the campus environment. Some have no problems in doing so, while others might feel overwhelmed. There are also those who are not confident with themselves, and they don’t have anyone to talk to, and this is where I step in.

There are those who are stubborn and sometimes they try to test me – see how far I can go until I lose my temper. This is the time when I have to be extremely patient – they are boys after all, and they don’t really know me that well yet, and neither do I. These things take time, and effort too.

I personally don’t like to be mean and strict, but most times it leaves me no option. With boys, there is a different approach. When we tell them nicely that they need to improve, they won’t listen. They’ll only do it when they see me being totally pissed off.

It kind of reminds me of Micah, in a way. Repetition works. But sometimes I worry what will happen by the time they finish the course. Who’s going to guide them? Tell them they need to improve? Encourage them and make sure they believe more in themselves?

I also wonder why I have so much faith in them. Sometimes I wonder if perhaps I’m too naive, because the students don’t think they’re good enough, therefore they don’t want to try their hardest. When exams are nearing, I can only hope that they can make it, and I keep telling them to push themselves hard up to the point when they can’t take it anymore. Because that’s the moment when they finally know that they’ve worked hard. And hard work will always reap something good.

That’s what I believe, and I hope my students believe it too. Unfortunately, only some do.

Week by week, as a teacher, it is my personal pride to see them grow. And it is my heart being broken to see some resisting to improve.

When they succeed, I feel joyful.

When they fail, I fail too.

And today, I saw both happened.

So I cry on my own, crying of my own failures. Crying because I feel useless.

Being a teacher is a tough job. But one’s gotta do it. And that person is me. So to motivate myself, I attach something nice for me to read, whenever I feel down. And I’d like to share it with you as well.

THE CREATION OF THE TEACHER

The Good Lord was creating teachers. It was His sixth day of ‘overtime’ and He knew that this was a tremendous responsibility for teachers would touch the lives of so many impressionable young children. An angel appeared to Him and said, “You are taking a long time to figure this one out.”

“Yes,” said the Lord, ” but have you read the specs on this order?”

TEACHER:

…must stand above all students, yet be on their level
… must be able to do 180 things not connected with the subject being taught
… must run on coffee, coke and leftovers,
… must communicate vital knowledge to all students daily and be right most of the time
… must have more time for others than for herself/himself
… must have a smile that can endure through pay cuts, problematic children, and worried parents
… must go on teaching when parents question every move and others are not supportive
… must have 6 pair of hands.

“Six pair of hands, ” said the angel, “that’s impossible”
“Well, ” said the Lord, ” it is not the hands that are the problem. It is the three pairs of eyes that are presenting the most difficulty!”

The angel looked incredulous, ” Three pairs of eyes…on a standard model?”

The Lord nodded His head, ” One pair can see a student for what he is and not what others have labeled him as. Another pair of eyes is in the back of the teacher’s head to see what should not be seen, but what must be known. The eyes in the front are only to look at the child as he/she ‘acts out’ in order to reflect, ” I understand and I still believe in you”,
without so much as saying a word to the child.”

“Lord, ” said the angel, ” this is a very large project and I think
you should work on it tomorrow”.

“I can’t,” said the Lord, ” for I have come very close to creating something much like Myself. I have one that comes to work when he/she is sick…..teaches a class of children that do not want to learn….has a special place in his/her heart for children who are not his/her own…..understands the struggles of those who have difficulty….never takes the students for granted…”

The angel looked closely at the model the Lord was creating.
“It is too soft-hearted, ” said the angel.

“Yes,” said the Lord, ” but also tough, You can not imagine what this teacher can endure or do, if necessary”.

“Can this teacher think?” asked the angel.

“Not only think,” said the Lord,. “but reason and compromise.”

The angel came closer to have a better look at the model and ran his finger
over the teacher’s cheek.

“Well, Lord, ” said the angel, your job looks fine but there is a leak. I told you that you were putting too much into this model.
You can not imagine the stress that will be placed upon the teacher.”

The Lord moved in closer and lifted the drop of moisture from the teacher’s cheek.
It shone and glistened in the light.

“It is not a leak,” He said, “It is a tear.”

“A tear? What is that?” asked the angel, “What is a tear for?”

The Lord replied with great thought, ” It is for the joy and pride of seeing a child accomplish even the smallest task. It is for the loneliness of children who have a hard time to fit in and it is for compassion for the feelings of their parents. It comes from the pain of not being able to reach some children and the disappointment those children feel in themselves. It comes often when a teacher has been with a class for a year and must say good-bye to those students
and get ready to welcome a new class.”

“My, ” said the angel, ” The tear thing is a great idea…You are a genius!!”
The Lord looked somber, “I didn’t put it there.”

For me, it is a time in which I will be truly tested.

Everyone at work had told me that the day would come for me to…

Arrange the party! Gaaaaaah!

Since it is Christmas and we do have Christmas parties on board our ships, it is normal that we should have one at the academy. And I am appointed to make this thing happen. The thing is, I don’t make parties. Hell, I don’t even do parties. I’m not a party person. I’m more of a stay-at-home-with-a-good-book kind of person. Parties make me nervous.

But it doesn’t seem like I have any choice on this matter.

For the past three weeks,  I’ve been coming home late because all the party preparation can be discussed with the students during after-class hours only.

On normal seasons, our academy usually has around one fifty students or more, but this is our busiest season yet as we have eight classes currently running and two more are coming next week.  There will be approximately two hundred and sixty people turning up at the Christmas party and worst of all is that we cannot hold the party outdoor like we used to since it is the rainy season and all.

So the venue will be at the Lido (our eating area) and lobby, which can only occupy half of the number of the students, plus we have a stage to be set up on the day.

For your information, I have never, ever organized any public events. At all.

I’m not a people person, I don’t know how to delegate, and the thought of having two hundred and sixty people all huddled up in Lido area with only five ceiling fans running really freak me out.

Worst still, all the other teachers at work have been too busy with their own projects – which is totally not their fault since we have eight classes running everyday and some of them have to teach combined classes. Luckily there are some who are still willing to help me.

Our biggest problem yet is dinner time. As I’ve said before, the Lido area can only occupy half of the students and staff. And to make matters worse, the big boss wants it to be a nice dinner where everyone is sitting down and be served a nicer-than-usual-dinner.

I proposed nasi goreng and fried chicken.

He said, “Nay. We’ll have steak.”

And he decided this after I proposed the budget, in which he disagreed to change.

Aaaaaaaaaaaargh! Aaaaaaaaaaaargh!

So steak it is, for dinner. We’ve also surveyed the students who don’t eat meat and provide chicken steak for them. Don’t ask me about the budget. I really don’t want to talk about it and honestly, up to this point I don’t really care.

The Lido and lobby area has been decorated by the students who have worked their ass off until past midnight, in which I am so thankful, and I am giving full authorisations to all my clerks students to do the important tasks such as getting the prizes for bingo and raffles, managing drinks orders, dinner and snacks, security, class performances and decoration.

I must say, after the decoration has been set and the dinner menu has been decided, the thing that worries me the most turns up to be the event itself. We want to make sure everything runs on time and on scheduled. I’ve appointed one clerk to be the event controller for the schedule and the class performance.

The rundown of the event has been made, but still it worries me a lot to think that anything can happen and it might ruin the party. Students can get drunk, they can mess up their timing for class performances, dinner serving might take longer time than usual, Bingo sessions might stuff up, power failure, etc., etc.

Let’s just hope for the best as we have only four days left to prepare everything. Meanwhile, to reduce the stress (mainly mine), I hope you enjoy the cartoon below.

I always get nervous on the first day of teaching a new class.

I don’t always know what I talk about. I just look like I do.

I get lost in the middle of talking about something (while teaching) because I totally forget what I say before.

Good looking students motivate me to teach better. Because they tend to be less intelligent than the average looking students.

There are always a few students every now and then who try to pick me up with the cheesiest lines ever.

A student had once told me that my fly was undone while I was babbling about some grammar rules. Fortunately, he did this privately. Unfortunately, some might already saw it and talked about it behind my back.

When really on to something, I tend to spit out more amount of saliva than I should. I think this is the curse of being a teacher.

I secretly enjoy giving hell to the students who deserve it.

The most challenging part of being a teacher is not about teaching the slow-witted ones, but it’s about  teaching the ones with the attitudes.

I gossip about the good looking students to the other female teachers – and sometimes even to the male teachers as well.

I’ve gotten a teddy bear, a heart-shaped furry pillow with my picture on it, a plastic rose (given as a special magic show performance by the students when they were graduating), an Elmo- lookalike mobile holder and a couple of t-shirts with the name of the company and the class number emblazoned on them as parting gifts from the students.

I’m still working on teaching students who are far much older than me without making them think that they can do whatever they want just because I’m younger.

Sometimes it gets so tiring having to smile and greet back all the students who greet me all day, just because that’s what they’re expected to do once they work on board and we, the teachers, are their guinea pigs.

I’m a very impatient teacher, actually. Five seconds is simply too long to answer one simple question.

I don’t agree to the idea of giving extra homework but most of the times I have no choice.

The students think I look younger than my age.

I get the feeling some pervy students really like it when I teach them because I look hot in navy uniform.

Almost 70% of my students have Facebook accounts.

They want to add me in their Friends List.

I don’t add all of them because I’m a picky teacher.

Seeing my students graduate is still the best feeling ever. Sometimes it makes me want to cry. So far, I’ve managed to hold it in.

When the management gives me so much crap, the students always manage to make me feel better almost immediately.

Being a female teacher is difficult.

No, no. Let me rephrase that. Being a female teacher is challenging. It is. Especially when you teach adult students in which about 99.99% percent of them are males in their early (and sometimes late) twenties.

Most of the time, the students are surprised to find out that I’m in my late twenties as well. I am indeed currently the youngest teacher at work, and that fact alone can make seem somewhat unconvincing – as a teacher and as a person they’re supposed to look up to.

I’ve gotten a few stares from students who doubt my abilities in the first days of their courses. Some even think it’s fine to actually attempt to flirt or even bordering on teasing me, even though as the company policy explains clearly on their orientation days, those actions alone can be categorised as sexual harassment.

It can be frustrating sometimes. Because like it or not, it’s common for Indonesian male to whistle, catcall or even yell obscene words to the opposite sex. This happened to me in one morning during my first two weeks since I started working; as I was getting out of my car and putting on my shoes (it’s absolutely impossible for me to drive wearing work shoes), I heard a whistle coming from a group of students who were gathering a few meters from where I was.

How did I feel? Insulted? Of course. Pissed off? Absolutely. Harassed? Definitely. But most of all, I felt hugely disappointed. I am passionate about my job and I care deeply about my students – and this is how they think of me? As a sex object in which they can whistle at just because they are used to get away with it most of the times?

A similar thing also happened yesterday morning,  in which it was my turn to teach the new Assistant Steward Lido class. At the end of the lesson, I was praising the students because they had been very good in answering questions, and all of a sudden one student who was sitting at the far right corner at the back started singing, “Because of you…” (Yes, you know that song, by that African-American whatshisname Martin?) in a way that was obvious that he was trying to tease me.

I immediately went up to him and demanded him to sing in front of the class. In which he started to get all embarassed and panicky, and his excuse was that he didn’t know the lyrics of the song. Of course I was only bluffing – all I wanted to do was trying to embarass him in front of the class simply because he was being an idiot. A few minutes after, he did exactly the same thing. Again.

I had to hold my anger because I wouldn’t want to yell obscenities to this student on his first day. It would be easy to go “Get the fuck out of my class, you fucking piece of shit!” and whatelses to him, but I thought better.

There are in fact procedures to handle these things. What usually happens is that the student get sent to the Academic Director (who always plays the bad cop role) and he will usually put the fear of God in him.

The fact is that singing, catcalling and whistling can all be perceived as sexual harassment. And this is a serious matter, because once they actually start working, they will have to deal with female (and male as well) American guests who are of course can be much more individual – in terms of clothing options  – than us, Indonesians.

But most of all it’s simply because we, as women have never had the courage to do something about it.  On the other hand, I am thankful that the place where I work in take sexual harassment very seriously. In other companies, us women would be thought crazy if we complain about such things.

Just like what Samantha Jones says, “Men are like dogs – the reason why dogs lick their balls is simple; Because they can.” Of course, she is talking about cheating, but I think the saying goes for harassing as well. Men can sexually harass women simply because they can.

So whenever I get the odd ones who try to be the class clown or simply try to test me – I’ll simply treat them like dogs.

Hey, it works with mine, except that my dog is far much better than them.

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.