Hi friends, 

Well, two weeks ago, we had 23 groups of middle school stay at the end of our week. We’ve had middle school students visit a few times but this was my first time with them for the full three-day schedule. At DGEV we have a Career Choices book for 7th & 8th grade, where we go over English vocabulary for 12 different career options. Some are cool like: Pro Gamer, Cartoonist, Event Planner, Film Editor (are those cool - you tell me) then we have uncool ones like: Finacial Advisor, Librarian, Optometrist, Teacher… are those uncool? Asking a 14-year-old if they want to be those when they grow up doesn’t go over with hip-hip-hoorays. 

I think my goal is to find a way to tell students that being financially responsible is like winning the lotto in life…

Eric actually came up with a great game for this (it’s his favorite MS class, as momma Kim will be proud) it’s a game in EXCEL - yuuup - but they pick RISKY or SAFE then roll 2 dice: one to see what percentage they receive, second to see if it’s POSITIVE or NEGATIVE (evens are positive, odds are negative) play this out as many times as they want, very fun with 30 kids trying to make it in the green to the end. 

For my careers I signed up for Environmentalist, Designer, and Film Editor; I had a few classes like Therapist, Cartoonist, and Professional Athlete scattered in there. 

Designer, was really easy for me, I made a PowerPoint describing a bunch of different jobs with pictures, gifs, memes of what you can do: product, web, graphic, packaging, environmental, and interior design. Then have them come up with their own logos with pictures of inspiration. 

Film Editor, I found some good videos that show the original footage, the edited version, along with the program down below with all the work that went into it. 

But that only goes so far, they got bored of the video, I wanted to get them involved in making and editing a video somehow… they don’t have computers, but they DO have phones and I’m sure make videos all the time. So I came up with a prompt of using some objects I brought to class: get into groups of 3, shoot a video on their phone, edit, then upload it to a website called Padlet. I managed to get a few classes make videos and submit them. But my big day of Film Editor the whole school I was teaching confiscated their phones… (a good thing when you don’t want them) waaahhh so I had to ditch the whole phone videos and jump to something else. Well, it was a rough day trying to fill up the 40 minutes with the video, book work and discussion… but it went okay. 

Environmentalist, oh man, I was so excited about this subject, but how to teach it? How to get into discussions when they don’t know all the English words that they might need? I translated a lot with Papago and got them to make posters about protecting the environment. 

Middle school is hard because they are not at an advanced level of English yet, if anything, they are still at a similar level to our 6th graders, they have just as hard of a time speaking and getting full sentences out. Now there are always exceptions, we get the 5-10% of students that speak and understand very well, then you have the students that still can’t ask to go to the bathroom. Then there is the pure apathy of middle school, as I’m sure any parent reading will know all too well, how on earth do you get a human that just wants to sleep or goof off to write in a workbook?? I haven’t figured it out. Wayne says you need to have no level of humiliation and just go in knowing you can meet them at any level, if they want to make fun of you or not work be able to get goofy, crazy. I don’t think I’m cut out for it, and that’s okay, I think I’ll stick to 5th grade for now. 

First bunch of photos are from Eric’s Cartoonist class they had them draw Einstein, Gandhi, an old woman with a knife, and then Sy from Gangnam Style. Hope you figure out each one. 

Second bunch is from one of my Film Editor classes, which they did not have phones for, so we made “storyboards” comic strips with animals that they picked or from the objects I brought to class. 

Third is from my Designer class which they made logos for.