12th Week: Spring is Here!

You can feel the school buzzing from the excitement of warmer weather and spring activities! It was another regular week at Poudre High School, but we had some fun activities planned in Economics. We started talking about rations, and we actually gave the students rations for things that they could/could not use in class. So, the students could use a desk but not a chair; they could use paper one day but not the next. They had to have a ration for water, bathroom breaks, and food. Mr. Long made the ration cards and based them on order of importance by the students. It was a fun activity, but proved to be challenging for classroom management. The last activity we did for the week was the soda taste test. We talked about the different types of market structures, which included perfect competition, monopolistic competition, oligopolies, and monopolies. In order to show how a couple of companies can control the market through advertising and imagined differences, we did a soda taste test. It was interesting because some of the students were brand-loyal to Coke or Pepsi, and those were the students that got the taste test wrong. The students that didn't drink much soda seemed to score better. The kids had fun, and we related the activity back to the market structures.

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In Entrepreneurship, the students continued their work on Promotional Planning. Project 6 was due on Friday, April 4th. Most of the students were able to complete the project and turn it in. I'm still having trouble with one student not coming to class. She hasn't attended class since Spring Break, so I called home to find out if her parents were aware of her absences and failing grades. I also wanted to see what I could do to help her understand the material or make up missed work. I had a stern talk with her before Spring Break, and apparently, she didn't like it. She stopped coming to class instead of talking with me about her concerns. This has been a trend with the high school students I have worked with thus far. Many of them would rather quit and fail than resolving any conflict or issues that may have arisen.

I'm looking forward to next week. It's Impalapalooza Week! The week before prom is traditionally set aside with activities and fun to celebrate spring, the warmer weather, the end of the year, and, of course, prom. Unfortunately, I'm missing most of the activities because I teach at Front Range Community College. There's a fun activity on Thursday called Mr. PHS, which is a "beauty" contest for the boys. It's staged and funny. The best part about next week is that I get a full day off. My daughter is in school, and I can get ready for the CSU Teacher Job Fair the following week and run some errands. That really does constitute excitement in my busy schedule.