CAREER DAY: KIPP

A Room of Eleven Year Olds Taught Me How to Run Every Meeting From Now On

Today I attended a Career day at KIPP Miami North Campus, the school right on MDC's North Campus. We represented Women in Tech. Two other women in tech and I were handed one table, one bin of supplies, and one assignment. Get a group of middle schoolers to build a structure out of flash cards and popsicle sticks.

That was the whole task. Build something that stands up. And whoever gets the highest structure gets a gift card. 

What I did not expect was to walk out having learned more than they did.

Link to PPT: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1nbN_RE4hJvdEVSNtF5REFnUjHOg1rZkIqcdDD65m3fY/edit?usp=sharing 

The thing I noticed

When the three of us leaned in and started building for real, the kids leaned in too.

I mean really building. Arguing about what would hold weight and what would collapse. Testing a base, watching it buckle, starting over. Hands everywhere. Loud. Fighting over the glue.

Then one of us would drift. Check a phone. Trail off in the middle of a sentence. Step back for a second.

And the kids drifted with us. Every single time.

Our energy went up, theirs went up. Ours dipped, theirs dipped. It was that immediate. Their attention was never tracking the popsicle sticks. It was tracking us.

I had walked in assuming the activity was the thing. The right materials. The right hook. The right worksheet. Get the activity right and the kids engage. That is what I believed.

It is not true.

What was actually happening

Engagement is contagious. It does not come from the activity. It comes from the person running it. You go first, or it does not happen at all.

There was a small moment that made this even clearer. When we told the kids we were building a framework, they did not get nervous about the big word. They lit up. "Ohh, like arts and crafts."

Yes. Exactly like arts and crafts.

I did not correct them. They were right. The work is not as far from glue and sticks as adults make it sound. They reached for something they already knew and decided "I can do that." And because we were all the way in, they stayed all the way in with us.

The second we checked out, so did they. Kids do not pretend. That is what makes them the most honest audience you will ever stand in front of. They gave me a clean reading I would never get from a room of polite adults.

Why this matters far past a classroom

Here is the part that stayed with me on the drive home.

That room was not special. That is every room.

It is the meeting where everyone sits quiet, waiting for someone else to care first. It is the workshop where the host is clearly going through the motions, and the whole audience can smell it within ninety seconds. It is the pitch where you showed up half in, and somehow the people across the table showed up half in too, and you blamed them.

The kids just made it impossible to hide. A room only gives you back the energy you carry into it. They proved it to me in real time, with popsicle sticks.

So here is what I am taking with me, and what I want you to take too.

Stop waiting for the room to get interesting before you commit. The room is not going to go first. The room is waiting for you. That is true whether you are eleven and holding a glue stick, or you are the person who called the meeting.

I am going to keep showing up. The career days, the meetups, the events with folding chairs and bad coffee. Not because I always feel like it. Because being the one who leans in first is not a personality trait. It is the actual job.

Go first.

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Building in public with The Mindful Dollar. Doing more with less.