Is it common for employers to ask you for an interview and say they’ll ask you to do a demo if the interview goes well. This strikes me as odd. Happened to anyone else before?
At least if you don’t do the demo, you know you bombed at the interview.
Everything here is odd. In general whenever I think I understand Taiwanese logic, the exact opposite of what I think is the truth.
But to answer your question, yes it’s normal.
There’s some decent info about demos around here to check out. Demos are tricky. Sometimes they use “fake students”. Employees of the school who can speak English reasonably well, but will ignore everything you ask them to do during your demo, or pretend to not understand. Clarification will be ignored, and basically it seems like they just want you to get pissed off, or learn to never interact with the students… I really haven’t cracked the logic behind this one yet.
In my first ever demo for adults, they asked me to teach something about colors and feelings. They told me these were basic level students (fake students, so we’re pretending here), so to be sure they knew what we were talking about I asked each person to point to something in the room that was that color. Gotta make sure they know what we’re talking about before we learn about feelings related to them, right? The students ignored me for the most part, and just as I was getting into the actual feelings part of the discussion, the boss cut me off (after about a minute) and told me I was out of time. I had something like 10 minutes for that section, but he insisted I really did use 10 minutes and we were out of time to continue.
Real students here ignore everything you say too (adults anyway, kids are always dying to talk to me), so maybe it’s an accurate way for them to act, but they won’t give you the first clue as to what they’re really looking for, or why they didn’t like you. Getting straight answers about almost anything in Taiwan is just about impossible.
Demos are also technically illegal, but don’t worry about that part unless they’re trying to pull some crap like making you teach an entire class for free. Before I got one of my first jobs in Taiwan, I found a post on here from someone complaining that the school I ended up working for asked the poster to teach a 2 1/2 hour class as a “demo”. This was the class I ended up teaching. They never asked me to do anything of the sort, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try… They did however string me along for weeks making me watch their classes unpaid before they gave me a class of my own.