Rachel's Paideia Blog

First Boys and Girls Meeting

I guess I'd better write about our first experience with the Boys and Girls club now, considering our second meeting is this afternoon. First of all, I think Daniel's assessment of 30 minutes being the maximum time limit of the kids' attention span was completely accurate. Like clockwork, kids started to lose interest and act up at the 30 minute mark. For the most part, though, they were good. They were mostly enthusiastic (particularly about the giant bag of popcorn we brought), though they seemed a little starved for attention. When we tried more basic moves, everyone was yelling "look what I can do!" and tried to impress us the most. That was a little difficult, but we managed. I think Shannon was particularly good at being forceful enough to keep kids' attention while still having fun with them.
Like we discussed in class, the biggest problem I felt that we encountered was Daniel's apparent lack of enthusiasm with our program. Luckily, the popcorn saved us there. But for future reference, I think it's a much better idea for the students (us) to introduce our programs and try to entice the kids ourselves. Also, that would have avoided the problem of karate chopping (martial arts!).
Overall I had a lot of fun. I got to know one kid, DJ, a little better than the others when he sat next to me and talked to me. He knew a lot about music for an 11 year old, and I was surprised by how witty and quirky he was. When we were slapping our hands on the ground for an exercise Shannon asked what it sounded like, to which he replied (only to me) "the introduction to 'Barracuda'!" I was amused.
I was also really glad that all four of us were there, because I feel like it would have otherwise been a lot to handle. And it was the most physical activity I've gotten in the past six months or so, which is pretty cool. I'm looking forward to our second session!

posted by Rachel @ 3:29 PM