My final week teaching One Hen ended strongly. This was due to several factors, one being their exceptional performance on the post-assessment and the variety of things that they expressed they had learned by being in One Hen this summer. These things ranged from learning about the cultural norms of Ghana (e.g., their favorite - the men eat first at mealtimes) to the fact that “high revenue, low costs” yields higher profit in businesses. Overall, it was clear that for my students, the One Hen curriculum was an effective and engaging one from which my students learned a lot! I know I did, and I’m the teacher J.
With this, I am somewhat concerned about how some of my students feel about the fact that they only had a $1 or $2 profit after all of their hard work. I’ve done my best to repeatedly emphasize that despite this low number, they’ve actually raised a lot of money and sold a significant amount of key chains; it’s just that, as our formula tells us, their costs were almost just as much as their revenue. For the most part, I’m finding that explaining this in this way has been effective, although I am sure that there are still those students that are a bit discouraged.
Something else I’ve tried to emphasize repeatedly is how proud they all should be as a class for the hard work they’ve done and the significant amount of money that they’ve raised for the two charities to which they’ve decided to donate almost all of their profits (a homeless shelter in Roxbury and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute). In sum, the two classes raised nearly $100 for both charities, and I’m so proud of them!
Teaching One Hen has been a wonderful opportunity for myself, as a new teacher. I’ve learned so much this summer that I will find useful during my first year of teaching! Whether it is basic business principles to keep in mind when discussing the Great Depression with my history students to the enduring lessons of the importance of giving back, I’ve benefitted tremendously from working with such an engaging and smart group of students through the lens of One Hen. I’ll never forget this experience!
