*Cara Talarico is a fictional character from my forthcoming novel, The Rules of Forever. Her opinions are strictly her own.
How Waiting Tables Made Me a Better Teacher
I firmly believe there should be a mandatory requirement for all people to work as a server in a busy restaurant at least once in their lives. The length of your commitment could be variable—a summer waiting tables would be the ideal—but one week of shift work should be the minimum. While you’re walking a mile in a server’s non-slip shoes—over the well-worn paths between tables in a restaurant dining room—you’ll be picking up skills that’ll be useful no matter where your career leads. You’ll also have a lifelong appreciation and understanding of exactly what it takes to provide good service.
Starting in high school, I worked in a popular seafood restaurant during the summers, first as a busser and later, a server. I also waited tables in an off-campus burger joint in college to help defray the cost of my tuition. The money was great. The work was hard. The life lessons were deeply ingrained.
Right away, waiting tables will sharpen some of those elementary concepts you learned in school, from rote memorization of the daily specials to lightning fast calculation of a twenty percent tip. It will also hone some of the softer skills you never earned a grade for: efficiency, teamwork, patience, advanced preparation, and grace under pressure. And it’s true, we’re talking food and beverage—not life and death, but a restaurant dining room is the best proving ground for gauging your ability to handle stress.
There is no better way to test your mettle than on a hot July night when your section is slammed, you’re in the weeds, and the hostess just sat you an eight-top with one shellfish allergy, two high chairs, and several obviously drunk adults.
Your adrenaline kicks in. Let’s fucking go. The list of tasks materializes in your head and you start getting her done—refill waters at table six. Key in mains for table two. Go to the bar and pick up cocktails for table twelve. The side of ranch for table four. Drop the check at table seven. Your co-worker needs a hand running the mains to her six top. Table two asked for extra bread rolls—don’t forget the butter. Check with the kitchen on table twelve’s off-menu request. Clear appetizer plates at table two because their mains have been fired and your busser is MIA. Birthday candle on the dessert for table ten. And on and on and on from five-thirty until eleven pm when you collect your last dishes off the pass and the line cook crumples up the ticket and chucks it in the bin.
It’s more than multi-tasking. It’s holding all seventy-two things you have to do in your head and slotting them into an order of operations that will be the most timely and efficient. And it’s this ability to instantaneously create a punch list of tasks that is constantly reshuffled and amended in real time that is useful—no, necessary—to teachers. Admittedly, in teaching, the magnitude of difficulty is greater, and if the classroom were a continuum, the consequence is closer to life and death than food and beverage.
But the elevator is broken—again—and you have to climb five flights to your classroom with the sixty notebooks you graded last night. And even though you arrived an hour earlier than usual, the line for the copier is three teachers deep and the box of paper you were given at the beginning of the semester is long gone anyway.
When that bell rings, signaling the start of your forty-five minute period, it already feels like you’re behind. And besides imparting the day’s rigorous and measurable objective, checking for understanding, and assigning meaningful homework, the trials your lesson will also include are (in no particular order)—your co-teacher is absent. Your colleague’s class runs long and seven students enter late. The SmartBoard that was working last period is suddenly on the fritz. The student who is chronically absent is here today—yay, she interrupts your Do Now to ask for a marking period’s worth of missing assignments—boo. Someone needs a band aid. The two chattiest students in the grade have taken it upon themselves to switch their seats and sit next to each other. Group work. The majority of students are more interested in their phones than in your lesson. You have just overheard two students discussing a rumored fight that will occur at lunch in the cafeteria. And the principal has stepped in to observe.
Sometimes it feels like those forty-five minutes last as long as the busiest dinner service, each moment a hard battle fought; sometimes it passes in a blink. Your mind is on high alert, processing every incoming stimulus and sorting it into its appropriate category: deal with it now, in five minutes, after class, during lunch, with a phone call home, never. After a busy dinner shift, it’s common to go out for a drink and forget about the pain of the last brutal hours. In teaching, you’ll be thinking hard about what transpired over those forty-five minutes and what you can do to squeeze more meaning, more impact, more effort from them the next day.
Waiting tables and teaching are both about nourishment. Food service deals with the short-term nourishment of the belly—teaching, the long-term nourishment of the brain. It’s also about the satisfaction of individual needs. The difference is with restaurant work, your diners are not shy about telling you what they need. In education, students rarely know what their needs are, and it’s up to you to supply and satisfy them.
Teaching takes that skill that was developed in the restaurant dining room and hardens it like tempered steel. Could you be an effective teacher without the training ground of a Mother’s Day brunch service? Of course. But at least this way, when you’re out for a meal, you’ll never leave your empty dishes unstacked ever again.
Cara Talarico teaches English at a New York City public school in the Bronx. Her interests include literature, decorative tile, and chopped cheese sandwiches. Learn more about her here.