peanut butter jelly time

Before you continue reading, I have a task for you. I want you to write down detailed instructions on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Did you do that? Great! Now you can keep reading.

Tuesday and Wednesday this week, Trevor, Thembi and I ran a Skillz 1.1. (GRS’ curriculum for Grades 6 – 8) Refresher Course for all of the coaches.  The point of this course was to re-familiarize coaches with the curriculum after taking almost a two-month hiatus from running interventions.

I’ll be honest – I was very nervous about holding this Refresher Course. Every Friday last year, we held Development Sessions for all of the coaches. The purpose of these sessions was to have coaches run through practices in front of their peers and receive constructive criticism. These activities were rarely taken seriously and as a result I thought that they were a complete waste of time.

So when Thembi, Trevor and I selected which parts of the Refresher Course we would run, I was determined to make sure that my sessions were fun, interesting, and most of all, worth while.

One of the sessions that I was in charge of was Practice 3 – Find the Ball (link to blog entry), which every coach believes is an easy practice. So in order to make my session grab the attention of the coaches, I decided to take a different spin on it.

And so I asked each coach to write me detailed instructions on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. This seemed like an easy enough task and they all finished within a few minutes. Then I had them do two things with their instructions. First, I asked them to compare the instructions they wrote with those of the person sitting next to them in order to see if they were exactly the same. Sure enough, the sets of instructions were not the same.

Next, I asked for volunteers to read their exact instructions, which I followed – word for word – in order to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. This was hilarious! One coach told me, “put the bread in front of you and use the knife to spread peanut butter on the bread.” He never told me to take out two slices of bread, so I just smeared peanut butter on the packaged loaf. This led to bursts of raucous laughter from the observing coaches. The other highlight of the day was when another coach instructed me to, “apply jelly to the bread.” Because they didn’t tell me how to “apply” the jelly, I used my hand, which led to even more laughter.

All in all, I wanted the coaches to understand two things; that we all have the same goal, but we may get to our goal differently, and that even the easiest activity can become challenging if it is not explained clearly. I’m pretty sure they all got my point and I think they enjoyed themselves too.

For the most part I was happy with how the two-day Refresher Course went. A couple coaches even admitted that it was much different than they had thought it was going to be and that they were pleased with how Trevor, Thembi and I had orchestrated the event.

At the office we’ve finally tied up all the loose ends regarding “management” and “operations” stuff, which means that next week we will start recruiting schools and planning interventions!