High Hopes, Low Expectations

Before we went to Palumbo Academy to launch this awesome campaign for the Phillies, we spent a great deal of class time learning about Urban Education.  We wanted to be prepared to deal with these Philadelphia Public School Students. I think that we all saw the potential in this program and wanted to make it something great.  Being that this was the first time that this had ever been done at Temple, I think we wanted to set the bar pretty high.

In all of our excitement, we laid out the goals that we had for the students.  Since they were high school students, we did not expect for them to produce work of the same caliber of us.  Therefore we agreed that marker comps would be sufficient.  We would create the PowerPoint for them.  We also didn’t expect for their presentation skills to be all that great.  However, once we met the students, we were pleasantly surprised.

First of all, I don’t think that any of us expected for Paulumbo Academy to be so nice!  It’s an amazing school filled with amazing students!  After a couple of ice breakers, we began to ask the students what they were interested in and what their skill sets were.  They were telling us that they already knew how to use programs from the Adobe Creative Suite such as Photoshop and Illustrator! One student even said that he knew how to make videos and edit them!  We were taken aback by their skills!

We also were surprised when we began to teach the students the basics of advertising.  At first, our lessons were very basic.  We didn’t want to overwhelm the students with too much information.  However, we saw that the students already knew a lot of the information that we were telling them.  In fact, the majority of them looked bored.  With this in mind, we had to re-plan our lesson plans in order to keep the students engaged.

This experience at Paulumbo taught us that we should not underestimate students just because of their age. Especially in this day and age when technology is at their very finger tips!