Class and the BUILD Program

I had an assignment the other day that included one hour-long class based on the BUILD program. This program is about business, and requires students to put together a business plan for an enterprise they envision starting.

What a substitute normally experiences in going into an y class is that the students think of the period as a holiday. Most don't do any work. They listen to their iPods, chat together, occasionally chase one another around the room (which has to be immediately stopped), and ignore the lesson they have been told to do and the handout they are supposed to work on.

A few work on homework for other classes. These students usually segregate themselves in a corner away from the others. And always there seems to be a hardcore group of do-nothings who have no intention of achieving anything during the period.

Since this class was about business, and since I have had at least three businesses during my life, I asked who was actually interested in starting an enterprise of their own. Five students out of 28 raised their hands.

I gathered the five in the front of the room, and we discussed the sort of business they were thinking of starting. It was a clothing business, based on sweatshirts, hoodies, and T-shirts.

I took the opportunity to give them a real life situation that they might some day encounter. Suppose some company sold them defective merchandise and would not give them a refund. What would they do ?

They replied that they would take the people to court.

I asked if any of them knew about small claims court. They didn't. And so I discussed small claims court, its inexpensiveness, its advantages, and how they might be able to find redress without having to hire a lawyer and spend lots of filing fees and all of that.

Then we spent about ten minutes talking about the most difficult part of any small business -- hiring the right employees. We discussed looking at resumes, what danger signs about an employee that might be there, but that might not be noticed. I told them some experiences based on bad employees I had made the mistake of hiring.

I think that these five, at least, learned something related to the subject they were supposed to be studying.