Young Men's Club - 5/1/08

On this day, I wasn't really sure what I was going to do. Maybe I was going to do a little bit of drumming and maybe a little bit of work on the speech. Unfortunately, the custodial staff who had been so kind in providing my club with buckets, promptly took about half of them for some reason. And at this point, it's impossible to have half the kids drumming. This is like the second or third time they've pulled this shit. They need to look up the word "gift." Anyway, by default, today became about working on the speeches. Despite the debacle of the previous day's experiment, I decided to try it again. I had the boys who were in the Drama club, teach the other boys the new lines. The difference was that I limited it to pairs hoping to avoid any major conflicts. In general, it worked out fairly well. Understandably, you ask kids to work privately and they turn it into an opportunity to screw around. I tried to pair kids who weren't close friends and yet they still managed to work it out, team up, and play instead of work. What I ended up doing was constantly calling each team over and telling them to perform the speech for me. When it was clear that they hadn't worked on it, I would make them run lines a few times and then tell them to go back and run those lines 10 times. I would stress the importance of repetition. After about a half-hour or so, I gathered all the kids in a circle and played a game with them based on how well they knew the speech. The old "toss the beanbag while reciting one word at a time game." This time, they had to be in the air when they had the beanbag. It was a pretty good idea accept that the boys who weren't playing at that exact moment would act like assholes. It's so annoying. Those boys would be punished by a loss of turn. Finally, I announced that the winning teams would be given prizes on the next day.