Why I Miss Bill Clinton (and other thoughts):

For the past two weeks, in addition to finishing the semester (barely) and continuing pneumonia recovery, I've been spending two hours, three afternoons per week with a group of 15 "low income/at-risk" youth in St. Paul. My beloved former employer wooed me back to teach a round of "Customer Service Skills for Retail." Anytime you get a group of teens together in a room for two hours at a time, the potential is great for much humor and occasional moments of "why am I here?" High school teachers, of course, know this already.

During the course of the training, my pupils have raised some interesting questions and brought to the fore things that I had not considered in preparing the training. Here they are:

1) What do you do if one of your enemies comes to the business where you are working and starts making trouble? What do you do? (Hint: enemy in this context signfies someone with whom you have live conflict and are likely to fight with physically or shoot a gun at/be shot at, etc). I didn't know how to answer this one, so I had the group brainstorm and we came up with a few options: take a break and go outside of the business to deal with your enemy, talk with your supervisor about the problem, ask your supervisor to be reassigned to a task in a location where your enemy cannot interact with you.

2) In discussing conflict and how to handle it (e.g. above), one student offered this assessment of his skills: "The last time I had a conflict, I felt the need to beat somebody up. They hit me on the back of the head so I had to." Never having been in such a situation where I felt so compelled, I wasn't sure what to say, so I continued going over the worksheet on ways to handle conflict, such as taking deep breaths, discussing the problem, etc, etc. Realzing the moment of total disconnect, I later made fun of myself for never having had the occasion or wherwithal to beat someone up. Got some good laughs - the self depricating goodie-two-shoes-white-girl-from-the-burbs card is a good one to play in such moments.

3) Yesterday, I orchestrated a simulated "corner store" in our conference room, utilizing a real cash register, and had the students take turns playing several customer service positions, such as cashier, stock person, and customer service representative. At one point, one young man working the register suggested that we simulate what to do in a robbery and began grabbing cash out of the drawer. I quickly told him (smiling) that I was not a qualified trainer on this topic and we continued on as normal.

It's been a lot of fun - much more so than a lot of my "ivory tower" activities of late. These kids are what it's all about for me.