It's Elementary
I'm doing a different thing for the elementary school this year. They have to spend so much time preparing for the WASL's the fourth grade classes can no longer schedule in half hour weekly reading sessions. This other program is called Lunch Buddies, and I hang out with a student for the lunch hour once a week. It is quite enjoyable, though I prefer the reading to a class. Maybe 3rd or 5th grade next year.
I've tried to find things which are fun, but different. Simply playing board games or something similar would be fun for a kid and easy to do, but I want something more memorable for both of us. My buddy is in sixth grade, so we're nearly forty years apart, which is an opportunity. I suppose you could look at it as a generation gap challenge if you'd rather. Last week we did a modified improv exercise, where we took turns making up sentences to tell a story. It was a way to find out how we play at those kind of games, and I kept it slower by writing down the sentences so we could be more deliberate in our thoughts. Maybe I'll try doing it without writing later.
I think what was fun for both of us was getting an insight on how the other liked to be silly, as well as some generational world view similarities and differences. This week I searched for images of the nine cars I've owned and brought them in. I went through them going from least cool to coolest and he had fun with that, then I asked if he wanted to sort them in his order of coolness. We both picked the '79 Datsun hatchback as the least cool. Again a fun way to learn about each other's world view. It also draws out conversation about other things in an enjoyable way. If I get back to reading to a whole class find I'll try to find similar interchanges as a way to engage more of the students.
I had the Prius as the next to coolest, the Corvette at the top. Am I that old? My favorite ain't the coolest? Okay, if I let my ethics and technogeek out of the closet the Prius is my favorite. I thought it funny my buddy identified the Prius as a Toyota. Not a Prius. Not a hybrid. They still seem new to me, but they've been around most of his life, so to him they're just Toyotas. Kind of cool that it's a now normal car to younger folks. It's a little thing, but positive progress is ... positive.
Off Topic. I just saw a UPS ad, where they are branding "Brown." The poopoo reference is timeless. What are their marketing people thinking? Not much if they are like other marketers who strive to go beyond the bounds of any sense of good taste or ethics, while producing highly skewed analyses to show how well their worst ideas are actually doing. We actually have some good marketing people here at Expedia, but every other place I've been ethics and reality were not part of the marketing job description. All I can say to the UPS marketing drubs is, "Heckuva job Brownie!" Somehow a laughable reference like that does not tell me positive things about UPS as a whole.
I've tried to find things which are fun, but different. Simply playing board games or something similar would be fun for a kid and easy to do, but I want something more memorable for both of us. My buddy is in sixth grade, so we're nearly forty years apart, which is an opportunity. I suppose you could look at it as a generation gap challenge if you'd rather. Last week we did a modified improv exercise, where we took turns making up sentences to tell a story. It was a way to find out how we play at those kind of games, and I kept it slower by writing down the sentences so we could be more deliberate in our thoughts. Maybe I'll try doing it without writing later.
I think what was fun for both of us was getting an insight on how the other liked to be silly, as well as some generational world view similarities and differences. This week I searched for images of the nine cars I've owned and brought them in. I went through them going from least cool to coolest and he had fun with that, then I asked if he wanted to sort them in his order of coolness. We both picked the '79 Datsun hatchback as the least cool. Again a fun way to learn about each other's world view. It also draws out conversation about other things in an enjoyable way. If I get back to reading to a whole class find I'll try to find similar interchanges as a way to engage more of the students.
I had the Prius as the next to coolest, the Corvette at the top. Am I that old? My favorite ain't the coolest? Okay, if I let my ethics and technogeek out of the closet the Prius is my favorite. I thought it funny my buddy identified the Prius as a Toyota. Not a Prius. Not a hybrid. They still seem new to me, but they've been around most of his life, so to him they're just Toyotas. Kind of cool that it's a now normal car to younger folks. It's a little thing, but positive progress is ... positive.
Off Topic. I just saw a UPS ad, where they are branding "Brown." The poopoo reference is timeless. What are their marketing people thinking? Not much if they are like other marketers who strive to go beyond the bounds of any sense of good taste or ethics, while producing highly skewed analyses to show how well their worst ideas are actually doing. We actually have some good marketing people here at Expedia, but every other place I've been ethics and reality were not part of the marketing job description. All I can say to the UPS marketing drubs is, "Heckuva job Brownie!" Somehow a laughable reference like that does not tell me positive things about UPS as a whole.
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