A Taste of Teaching

This week I had the opportunity to play teacher a little bit by volunteering for Junior Achievement. I visited a Grade 6 classroom for a total of 4 hours over 2 days to teach the "Our Business World" program. This program is a great introduction to business for 12-year-olds, covering what you need to know to create and staff a business, produce goods and market to your audience. This was a great chance to interact with the kids, get to know their names and a bit of their personalities, and see what kind of cool stuff comes out their heads. They were asked at various times to create company names, figure out how much rent would be, and create an ad for their product. I was very impressed at some of the ideas the kids came up with, and also with the media savvy of some of them - they already seem to realize that advertising does not necessarily equal truth, which is awesome. It is very interesting to watch them work through things, like when we were discussing how much to charge for hypothetical skateboards at a hypothetical skate shop we were opening. Using a very simple cost-per-skateboard model, we decided that if we bought the boards for $50 from the supplier we would need to sell them for $300 to make a profit once we paid for staff, overhead etc. For some of them this seemed to be quite a revelation and you could almost see the gears turning - very similar to how my dog looks as she is trying to figure out what I want her to do in our obedience class. I love seeing the learning process happening before my eyes. I also found myself wanting to spend more time with these kids and get to know them better. One girl asked me at the end of the presentation if this was my first time doing it and she told me I did a good job, which is appreciated from a girl who showed during the class that she wasn't afraid to make her true opinion known! I'm now wondering if volunteering in a school would be enough to scratch my teaching itch, or if it will simply make it worse...