Week 15, Marlborough School

December 20, 2011


Designing Houses, job interviews


I was nervous about today's class, I had a moderately ambitious agenda and was unable to find outside help for class.  Neither of the two promised helpers from the school were available.  I got lucky, it turns out that Science Club was also meeting this morning, so several homesteaders were not present.  I had a nice small group of nineteen today (perhaps it was somewhat the nature of the nineteen that were present that made the group feel "nice and small").  I began the class by setting out pencils and paper on all of the desks.  The Spanish class seems to have taken all of my pencils, it was necessary to obtain more.  I drew rudimentary side, front and top views of houses on the board.

When the class came in and settled I explained the next step in Village.  Everyone will be making houses, presumably out of wood.  With a few pointers (you will need to build what you create, you will need to pay {in meeps} for your materials, you will need to use your design plans to actually build your house, real building code is eight feet between a floor and ceiling {it doesn't need to be twenty}) and a few questions (mostly for the trading post) the kids got started.

While the class was working on drawings, I began the job interviews.  Morton and Michael both applied for the position of trading post manager.  Morton has quite a lot of experience, so I hired him as manager and Michael as assistant to the manager with the stipulation that Morton train Michael as his replacement.  Next I interviewed for Bank manager.  Only one of the applicants, Carman, was in class today.  She seems to have a bit of useful experience herself.  Carman also doesn't have a problem with being the boss, and working above people.  I haven't hired her yet as I still need to interview the other applicants.  I interviewed Maria for the position of Newspaper Editor.  I think she would be a great fit for this job, she is certainly qualified, but she wasn't sure she wanted to be in charge of others.  She decided to instead apply for a job as a journalist.

After the interviews I worked with those who needed a little bit of help.  I think the class was extremely productive today, especially considering most of the work was independent.  Before class was done I asked the students to keep a look out for certain types of trash (plastic windows) in their holiday wrappings.

After vacation I will bring in the empty cereal boxes for those who finished their house plans today to begin building cardboard models.  Over the break I will write up a parent letter about Village and what we are doing in class and to solicit volunteers and materials.