Middle School Presentation

While its still fresh in my head, I just wanted to write down some observations about the presentations we gave to the Martin Luther King Middle School this morning. Overall, I do understand why it was important to speak with a class, but why the specific middle school? I have no idea. They were a tough crowd to speak with, probably mostly because of the area, I don't want to say that race was an issue, but the school was about 98% black. The first class was fine, they were the 7th graders, which were younger than the second. We also had a lot more people for the first presentation, so everyone gave their little part, it was fine, ran real smoothly and the kids got into it. The second class we talked to was the 8th grade, which were a little tougher, they acted like they were too cool to listen to the visitors speak. Its whatever. We only had 2 people to speak for the second part, which made it a lot harder and put more pressure on them, in the first presentation, people would fill in some information here and there for each other, throw in their 2 cents. Because of the shortage of personnel, we couldn't conduct the game like we had done in the first presentation, which took out the class participation aspect of the demonstration, so the kids sat down in the chairs and weren't as into it. We also had some technical difficulties with the computers and displaying our website, which was a pretty big hit. They computers we totally outdated, which meant they were a big issue with displaying them on the computers, plan B was to show it on a projector, but we couldn't get the right connection for the Mac laptop. So we wound up just holding up Sean's laptop and showing small groups at a time, which really sucked, but sometimes you just have to do what you gotta do. Next time we'll be completely prepared for the worst, plan for everything so we don't run into this kind of problem in the future. The freebie bags were a big hit though, for the gardening aspect of our page, we prepared some baggies with homemade grow kits for the kids, which everyone was pretty excited about, kids always love free stuff. One last thing I noticed in the presentation that I feel could have been beneficial was adding in some of the recycling facts that I had read over for research. We had planned on throwing those in there, but I think in the heat of battle, we just got nervous and forgot. I just think it would've been facts that the kids could easily visualize, which would give them a better idea of the impact we have on our planet with trash and how much recycling can aid in our planets health. Besides that, we did good, I should have some pictures real soon, they just need to be downloaded and edited. I haven't felt the greatest lately, so I've been trying to hang out, get some school work done,