Slide outline for Lesson 7.1. Twelve slides, one day. Slides 6 and 7 (the weak-and-strong table and the three parts) become the reference slides for Lesson 7.2's drafting period, so keep them.
The Resume and the Three-Part Bullet
- Unit 7: Launch. Career Readiness and FACS Shark Tank
- Lesson 7.1, Topic 7.1 Present Yourself
- Today: you find out what is already in your folder
Teacher notes
Image: a plain manila folder, closed, on a desk.
Leave this up as students walk in. Their FACS folders are already on their desks. Say nothing about them. Half the class will open one on their own.
Do now
- You are applying for a paid summer job at a place you would actually like to work
- You get one sheet of paper to convince them
- What goes on it? Make a list
- Two minutes
Teacher notes
Cold call four students. Write only the headings they name. Most classes produce "name, phone, jobs I had." Leave their list on the board; the gap between it and slide 5 is the lesson.
Six to eight seconds
- That is how long somebody reads it the first time
- Not six minutes
- Sometimes a computer reads it before a person does
- Every line has to earn its space
Teacher notes
Image: a stopwatch showing seven seconds.
This is the hook. Hold up the real, anonymized adult resume while this slide is up. Then hand one copy to each table and give them 45 seconds to find three things it has that their list did not.
Who actually reads it
- A manager who has forty of these
- A coach, a camp director, a program coordinator
- Software looking for words
- Nobody who already knows you
Teacher notes
The last line is the one that matters. "Nobody who already knows you" is why "hard worker" means nothing on paper.
The seven sections
- Name and contact (town, not street address)
- A one-line summary
- Skills
- Experience: school, volunteer, and family responsibilities all count
- Activities. Awards. Languages
Teacher notes
Image: a one-page resume shown small, with the seven sections outlined in boxes and no text readable.
Students write these on the handout. Stop on "experience" and say out loud that watching siblings, cooking dinner, and translating for a parent all belong there. Stop on "languages" and say that a student who speaks Turkish, Portuguese, or Spanish has a skill an employer pays for.
The rule, twice
- Everything on it must be TRUE
- Everything on it must be SPECIFIC
- Two ways people lose a job offer: a lie, and a line nobody can picture
Teacher notes
Say both out loud. A lie gets found out after you are hired, which is worse than not being hired.
The three-part bullet
- The work. What you did
- The explanation. How, with what, for whom, how many
- The output. What came out of it. Use a number
Teacher notes
This is the core of the lesson. Model it live on the board from weak to strong, thinking out loud, then ask the class which part is which.
Weak and strong
| Weak | Strong |
|---|---|
| Helped in the kitchen | Cooked a pasta dish for 30 people as Station Manager, running a written eight-block time plan, and served every plate inside the 40-minute period |
| Did a sewing project | Hand-sewed a lined drawstring pouch from scrap fabric using a backstitch, and it held 5 pounds when tested |
| Good with money | Managed a $10,000 practice portfolio for six weeks, rebalanced after a market drop, and finished up 7 percent |
Teacher notes
Read each weak one out loud in a flat voice, then the strong one. Ask: which part is the output? Do not explain; ask.
Your turn. Fix two of these four.
- "I am a hard worker"
- "Helped cook food in class"
- "Good at working with other people"
- "Did a project about a business"
- Pairs. Eight minutes. Use something that actually happened to you
Teacher notes
Circulate with one question only: "How many? For whom? What came out of it?" Note that number one is a trap; it cannot be fixed as written, it has to be replaced with evidence. Let a pair discover that.
Now open the folder
- Highlight every rubric, self-check, and card
- Find FIVE pieces of evidence
- For each one, one sentence: why would an employer care?
- The rule: you may only write something you can point to
Teacher notes
Image: a student's hand on an open folder with a highlighted page.
Ten minutes. Circulate and ask the pointing question: "Show me where that is." Add anything the class forgot to the "This Year We Actually Did" chart.
This year we actually did
- Cooked and served in labs. Passed a safety exam
- Planned and priced a meal for four on $40. Costed a meal for thirty
- Built a budget. Ran a portfolio. Wrote an Investor Report
- Sewed and mended. Designed a room to scale. Built a kit for a four-year-old
- Speak a language at home. Take care of people
Teacher notes
This slide is the argument of the whole unit. Leave it up during the mining. Point at it when a student says they have nothing.
Exit card
- 3 lines
- 1. Your strongest bullet, all three parts
- 2. One section you have nothing for yet
- 3. One question about tomorrow
- Three volunteers read line 1, standing
Teacher notes
Sort into "has a real bullet" and "needs a conference first." The second pile is tomorrow's conference order. Tomorrow they write the real thing.