I spent my afternoon today at Eden Prairie High School as a guest speaker for Mr. Mark Anderson's "career explorations" class. I spoke to six consectutive groups of 10-12 students for about 22-25 minutes on the joys and pains of being a city manager. There are many more joys than there are pains for me, so I don't mind at all talking about what I do. 
And the students are great. They were interested in my job, but they were really interested in what's going on in the community. Among the many thingswe discussed during my short stint there today, the students and I talked about the proposed development of the Bent Creek Golf Course; the use of surveillance cameras for traffic enforcement; development of a new indoor swimming pool project; new stores they'd like to see at Eden Prairie Center; the recent percevied "crackdown" on underage drinking; and traffic signal synchronization (yes, really).
I brought prizes. Well, I brought DVD copies of the City's television show "Life In The Prairie", if you can call that a prize. I gave DVD to the first person in each group that could tell me the name of Eden Prairie's Mayor. And you know what? There was a student in every group I spoke to today that knew the answer to that question was The Honorable Nancy Tyra-Lukens. I was impressed by that.
As a group, they were smart and engaged. I feel better about our future (as a country and as a planet) after meeting these students today.
