Biz Town

Today I tried something new.  I volunteered, with some other friends at my church, to help with the Biz Town (Jr. Acheivement) experience for about a thousand 4th and 5th graders from South Wayne Elementary School. Actually it was more like 80, but it felt like a thousand as they milled around, going from "business" to business doing their assigned projects. It was an interesting experience and I will probably agree to do it again but it was also frustrating in some ways. I had one boy in my group of seven (we were the utility company) who needed to be led by the hand through his jobs, which involved quite a lot of reading. He also was very intense and easily upset when he met with any frustration. I'm not sure how jobs were assigned but he would have done much better with the job of changing furnace filters in all of the other companies. The boy who actually did that job finished in an hour and didn't have much else to do for the rest of the 5-hour experience. Overall it was well organized. The staff at JA had everything we needed to get the jobs done but I felt I could have done a better job of helping my group if I hadn't had to focus so much on one student.  I didn't know, until I was filling out their computerized survey at the end of the day that there was on-line training I could have taken. Maybe next time. One thing assured me the students were learning something. Early in the day, when the students had only finished a small part of their jobs, one girl said to me "No wonder my parents are always so frazzled when they get home from work at night."