TEXT TRANSCRIPT
Narrator:
The restaurant industry is one of the largest employers in the country today. And even though many people think of servers and cooks when you mention working for a restaurant, the industry offers many other occupations, from managers to cleaning help to accountants. As part of Lyndy Girten's adult learning class at the Rend Lake College Skills Center in Mt. Vernon, Illinois, students learn all facets of the restaurant business, including how technology can be part of this ever-growing industry.
Girten:
This is a G.E.D. classroom preparation. Our students are sixteen years of age until they can't get around anymore. I think I personally have had individuals who were in their late sixties in my class. We have tutors available in the classroom. These students work Monday through Thursday, four hours a day, which is a total of sixteen hours in our classroom. Not all of that time is... when we do have a problem, such as the Restaurant Problem, not all of that time is spent just on the Restaurant Problem.
We try and look at what's happening in the real world, and then we try and match that up and integrate that with the kind of skills that a person will need in order to pass the G.E.D. For example, the Restaurant Problem:
The Restaurant Problem is an integrated, problem-based learning situation. At the beginning of the problem, each student is given a package of information that has to do with a fictitious restaurant that's going under. And they are employed by a fictitious CEO to investigate the restaurant:
payroll sheets, employee behaviors, record-keeping practices, whatever. And then go through the different problems, determine which ones are the ones that they can do something about, make recommendations for how to solve certain problems. Work with the computers to line up the schedules, to figure payroll sheets. We plug in to all these fictitious activities, academic skills that will help them pass the G.E.D., and skills-- life skills, I guess you could call them-- that they can in turn take to the work situation that they might find themselves in.
[To student] I'm hiring you to be in charge of this restaurant, and the restaurant's having serious problems. I'm giving you fifteen hundred dollars to start with, and I expect you to figure out, basically, what the problem with the restaurant is, and what some possible solutions are, and then pick some of those solutions and work 'em up.
Student 1:
How many employees?
Girten:
These are the timesheets that your employees have turned in for a week, and I got to be honest with you, Chico, I think they're cheatin'. I think some of them are cheating; maybe on purpose, maybe accidentally. But your job, should you decide to accept it, is to review what their hours are, figure up according to their hourly rate what their pay's going to be each day. Now, you're going to have to work on some manager stuff too, so if you're the person in charge, you're the manager and you've got some folks who are smokin' in the boy's room, or something, this may not be helpful to the restaurant, this may be putting a bad light on things, so here are some situations that I want you to look at and think of from a manager's point of view. What would you do about it?
These are some complaints, customer complaints. And then I want you to write something out, Chico, I need a nice paragraph. Remember, all... you're going to remember about writing paragraph. You have to have a main idea to answer the question, then you have some sort of details to support whatever it is you said. So make it real, as though this person came to you with this problem, and you were going to deal with it as the manager. And then the restaurant has had a complaint also, and this is the complaint, and I want you to deal with that complaint. If you want to write a nice little letter, give him a nice little gift certificate, or whatever people do.
Student 2:
We received a letter from a man who was at a restaurant and had bad service. His reservation was lost, and he waited thirty minutes for a table. So we're writing a letter to him telling him how our restaurant was sorry for his wait. We're giving him two gift certificates for-- four gift certificates for his family, and telling him how our restaurant is going through a change and that's why his service was not satisfactory.
Student 3:
Tracy is an eight... eighteen-year-old part-time college student who has had only baby sitting jobs before this waitress position. She has been working at the restaurant for four months now. She lives at home with her mother, drives a brand-new Camaro, and wants to move to Bloomington when she finishes the local college. Tracy frequently requests the weekends off so that she can pursue the social life. If she isn't scheduled to be off on weekend nights, she usually doesn't show up anyway. So that's why I'm firing her, 'cause she don't want to show up when she ... when I need her. And... and I need my waitresses when I ... when I need to work. So I wrote her a letter, and I told her my situation, what I wanted her to do and that, and then I told her if she couldn't comply with my ... with my agreement with them, then there was no... there's no alternative to letting her go, so, I fired her.
[Reading] "Dear Tracy:
You want the weekends off, but if you are scheduled to work, you should work. Come in, not take off when you feel like it. Therefore, I feel like I can't use you at my restaurant. Maybe it would be better if you could find a job where you would not have to work on weekends. I can't tolerate your frequent absence. You're fired."
Girten:
This particular time the Restaurant Problem has an interesting twist because... usually the problem runs from a week to two weeks. We've tailored it down this particular round to fewer days than that, but the culmination of this problem is going to be that we're going to a local restaurant, set up already, and we're going to be evaluating the services of that restaurant:
the employees, the cleanliness, the food quality, and such as that. And we're also going to be developing for them prototypes of menus that they have agreed to consider, and then we're going to let them select one that they like, and then we're going to mass-produce them for them, and they'll really use them in their restaurant from now until forever. It's a brand-new restaurant in town, and they have... haven't had a lot of... time to... time or money, as a new business starting out maybe, to really get into the public relations, marketing kind of things, so they're really excited. We're partnering with this restaurant as a community effort, and our students are getting some valuable experience in... in working with the graphics and word processing on the computers, and they're going to get usable product at the end, and... and it'll have wonderful implications, and inspire lots other students to come along and read that, that these menus were made by the G.E.D. classroom in Mt. Vernon.
Student 4:
I'm making a menu for Let's Eat Smoked Bar-B-Q. We're in a competition in making one for the restaurant. They'll pick one... and they're gonna put our names on it, and use it for... in the restaurant. This is their menu they started out with, and we made it... we're going to make it a two-piece... this is the... going to be the inside of it. And then we're going to have the desserts and the drinks on the back of it. The hardest part was finding the best print on it, and making sure they could, you know, read it, and... the funnest part was finding the pictures to go along with it, things like that.
Girten:
I've seen a good response in this kind of... classroom situation. They like working on things that are practical, that they can associate with their own lives, and they can see the value in knowing how to do this. And as far as working on the technology end of it, they get a lot of self-esteem and... and a real boost in their confidence, which is going to spill over in everything else that they do for me. Being able to use the computers, and being able to communicate with one another, on what are you doing, or how did you do that, and we'll work as a team almost, and to cooperate, and collaborate. They like this freedom of not having to sit in one spot and start at the top and work until you get to the bottom. They like the flexibility and the freedom, and putting their own ideas into something, and the end product, being slightly different from their neighbor's, but in the same ballpark.
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