Quick Job Update

It's a weird feeling watching the beginning of the year emails roll in from my school psychology job in Reynoldsburg. I feel a bit guilty, like I should be there preparing my list of evaluations and taking part in beginning of the year planning meetings. Then again, I'm not ready to go back to Ohio and feel as though I'm just getting started here. And, I'm content with my series of part time jobs. That said, here's a quick update.

The job that occupies the majority of my time is teaching two kids from San Francisco, ages 8 and 10. We have class on Tuesdays and Fridays from 2:15 to 5:15. They're bright kids and in a 2:1 situation, I'm able to tackle some relatively tough topics. The crux of my lessons is a curriculum from their previous school in the states. The 10-year-old is studying the California Gold Rush of 1850. The 8-year-old is studying tall tales, the salmon life cycle and salmon stewardship. On top of the recommended curriculum, I've tried to add lessons that are relevant to the kids' lives and what's going on in the world. For instance, I taught them about Chile when they traveled to a ski resort near Santiago on vacation and ditto for when they took a sleeper bus to Mendoza, Argentina. Other examples are that we had a competition focusing on the olympics to teach the kids about market dynamics and on July 4th we explicated The Declaration of Independence.

I try to start each day off with a fun brain teaser game and ease into the day from there. Occassionally, I give them time to reflect on their school days as a means of allowing them to get off their minds anything lingering from school that might impede our time together. Lately, we have been journaling, but any sort of writing is difficult to get out of them after an already lengthy school day. Sometimes too we play competitive games to see who can decipher passages from Shakespeare and for my school psychology friends out there, we have been working on short-term memory through digit span type games.

Today marks the ending of our olympics competition, a market-based game in which we predicted the outcomes of 5 different sports. The idea behind it is if they predicted a favored team to win and the team won, they earned 1 point where as if a team that was not favored wound up winning, they earned 5 points (greater risk, greater reward). As it turns out, the 8-year-old girl won and as such, I will be taking her a large dulce de leche con brownie (Gold) ice cream cone. The 10-year-old came in second (Is there a silver colored ice cream that isn't appalling? I will soon find out) and I came in third (I'm not even giving myself a years supply of rice-a-roni). After the awards ceremony/ice cream party, we will talk about the general concept by which it worked, and connect it to the stock and other market concepts. I know, big stuff for kids this young, but when it's just the 3 of us, we can really push the limits.

The next big activity is a stock market game, an extension of the olympics competition. The rules are 3 stocks, 1000 dollars/stock, unlimited trades (10 dollars/trade), and choosing stocks that meet 2 sets of 5 criteria/market dynamics that we are going to talk about (supply and demand, risk reward etc.) After one month, we will see who has the most virtual money. The winner gets....Probably something to do with dulce de leche (Hey, cheeseburgers and cherry cokes seem to work for Buffet, right?)