Pitch Meeting

As part of the after school program's structure, each apprenticeship is preceded by a "pitch" session where the kids go from room to room to hear about the different opportunities and then rank their choices the week before apprenticeships begin. We were told we would have about 5 minutes to pitch students on the topic of our apprenticeship and we would see 11 groups each.I hadn't been reassigned a teaching partner, but did have the chance to get together with some other women leading the Girl Scout MEdia series at another school. We worked together to create what I thought was a good pitch. The final power point had some slides on the Girl Scouts, a game using images of female celebrities and some other general information about the apprenticeship.I got to campus around 4:15 and flipped through my slides nervously. The bell rang and suddenly it was my turn to rally the crowd in the room and get them excited about Girls & Media. I spent 4 harrowing minutes trying to go through a power point while kids yelled out, rolled their eyes, put their heads down on the desk and asked the other teacher if they could go to the bathroom. I kept getting "what is this apprenticeship about?" and at that point I didn't have a great answer. Then before I could wrap my head around what had happened, the bell rang, the kids lined up and more kids flowed into the room. I was again caught unawares, struggling through the slides, trying to explain why girls and media was interesting. I still hadn't quite figured out the end goal, the big picture, at least it seemed that way to the group of kids in the room.Thankfully my survival instincts kicked in and I switched up the order, skipped the slides about me (because let's be honest, they didn't care!) and did one other thing, I had the girls sit up front, since they were my target audience. Pitch sessions 3-11 were much better. The game, where I put up pictures of celebrities on the screen and had them shout out who they were, was popular, with boy even shouting out answers from the back. So was the slide that had an image of a Girl Scout sash filled up with patches and pins. I could literally see some eyes twinkling in the name of badges!At the end of the hour and a half, I was exhausted. Every time a new class walked in, I had to gauge the energy, decide where was best to start to ensure that they were remotely interested and then present the content in a way that wasn't over complicated so that they knew generally what we would be doing for 10 weeks. My brain was racing, how could that have been done better? What wasn't really framed in a way that was meaningful for the students? How do I handle behavior issues? Did I make sense?!Some other interesting things that came up during the session, the kids all knew people like Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Vanessa Hudgens (didn't have a clue who she was until this week!). Most of them knew Hillary Clinton, as the woman who "lost to Obama" in the election. However, I thought it was interesting that most kids couldn't recognize Katie Couric, although some kids shouted out "that's the lady from the news!" and a lot of kids didn't know who Oprah was. It made me think again about getting to know them better, understanding who they were so that I could relate to them.