Planning for the future and working through distractions

JDHS House Build Blog 3/3-3/14

By: Samuel Bibb

The week started with class advisor Jess May continuing to reinforce his Idea of teaching the students to plan out their lives before High school ends. Jess ran the kids through an experiment where all of the students made a poster laying out goals in the next 4-10 years that the students wanted to meet. The students threw out ideas all over the place such as being an electrician to traveling to all 7 continents. The class started this unit before winter break when Jess assigned the kids to write a paper explaining a perfect day sometime in their life where everything in that day was what they absolutely wanted.

On Tuesday the class changed scenery when it moved from the classroom to the job site. The main objective of the day was to clean up the site and the house before the inspector arrived. Once he arrived, he did his normal check up on the house, then he went into teaching mode, when students started asking questions about the house and other life questions.

With the region basketball tournament being in Juneau during the week multiple students missed class wednesday and friday due to activities related to the tournament. That left only five students left to work on those days. the number would have been four but a student that disappeared at the beginning of the school year showed up again to surprise the class. With the five people at the class on friday, the team used the time cutting and preparing siding for the next week.

Distractions show up all the time in life, in this case half of the JDHS house build team spent the week dreaming of where they were going to be the next week. Five members of the house build team will be traveling to central florida during spring break to work with Habitat for Humanity framing houses. With this image being cemented in some of the students and teachers minds, the overall effort from everybody began to decrease. The class made a smart decision when they decided to spend the whole week in doors. 

The week started in the classroom with Jess assigning the class yet another homework assignment that implemented what he has been preaching about planning for the future. The assignment was an extension of the S.M.A.R.T activity that the students completed the prior week. 

At the jobsite the house has reached a point at where the whole structure is completed, but all it needs now is the “pretty work.” The pretty work is the finish on the house, like the paint, the interior, and other things that make the house look better on the inside and outside. The first task on the pretty list was to paint the siding strips. First the class had to move all of the siding strips into the scene shop, then they could begin painting. The class spent the rest of the week working on that single task. 

Editors note: On Saturday the 15th the JDHS homebuilder will be traveling to Stuart, Florida, where they will be helping out Habitat For Humanity. The homebuilder will spend a week in Stuart framing houses during the day and enjoying the weather the rest of the time.