Summer Camp: Personal Learning Using Sports

My first summer camp job, back while I was still in college, was teaching swimming at a sports camp at my old high school. While the camp certainly focused on teaching athletic skills in the various sports that were offered, the main goal of the camp was to use sports as a means to teach important life skills: teamwork, sportsmanship, the value of practice and hard work, and so on.

Each class, regardless of the sport, began and ended with a warm up and cool down in which the kids were asked to set goals for the day and then evaluate their performance. In swimming these tended to be more individual goals. "I will swim a full length of the pool without stopping." "I will put my face in the water." But in the team sports there was also an emphasis on group skills. "I will congratulate an opponent on a good play." "I will pass the ball to a teammate."

Because of these warm up and cool down times, the experience of sports was much more about process than about result. I have tried to maintain that emphasis as a coach at the middle school and high school levels. I have coached an undefeated state championship volleyball team, as well as multiple teams who have not won a single game, and a little of everything in between. Hopefully what all those experiences have had in common for the players on those teams was an emphasis on having fun and on getting a little bit better every day. As in the classroom, it has been a good day at sports practice if you have improved, and maybe learned a bit about yourself in the process.

Summer Camp: Student Choice

One of the central characteristics of my former camp was the focus on student choice. This focus was played out in many ways, but always came back to the idea that the students should feel ownership over everything that they did. One example of how this was put into practice was in video class, in which a small group of students planned, acted, filmed and helped edit a short movie.

During the first days of the class, students would go through a basic brainstorming process. They start with genres, and work their way to brainstorming more specific plot ideas. They are coached that all ideas are valid at this point in the process and that they should only react positively to other people's ideas.

Once a sufficient number of ideas are up on the board, they start the decision making process. They are invited to advocate for ideas that they particularly like (but never to criticize someone else's ideas). After everyone has had a chance to put in a good word for their favorite, the ideas get narrowed down. The emphasis is on building a consensus in which everyone is happy with the final decision. Counselors help them along using a lot of the 'yes and' approach. 'Yes your movie can be about aliens taking over the camp and cheerleaders who travel in time. We can make that work.'

When the plot of the movie has been chosen, the students continue to be involved in as many of the decisions as possible. Where should the camera be in this scene? What would make this more understandable for the audience? Was that take good enough, or should we film another?

The challenge when you put the focus so much on what the students want is that you could end up with the inmates running the asylum. When it is a parody of Lord of the Rings meets Finding Nemo, it's not too big a deal if the kids make kid-like decisions from time to time. But if we are going to bring these ideas into the classroom, there's a lot more at stake. There is curriculum to cover, and good behavior to teach, and that ever-important classroom management.

So how do we give students choices without them making the wrong choices? Is there even a place for student choice in the classroom?

Summer Camp: Challenges

In this series of summer camp related posts, I keep coming back to the day camp back in Massachusetts where I have been a camper, counselor and administrator. Many of my ideas about what an ideal school would be like, especially in terms of building community and character, come from my experiences there. One of the big pieces of that community building experience was what we called challenges.

Anyone who has done a leadership training course or any sort of Project Adventure program will be familiar with the idea of challenges. Basically, a group is assigned a cooperative task with a set of proscribed rules to make the task more difficult. Completing the task generally requires that the group work very well together and that every member of the group be involved in getting to the finish. One of the classic examples is a challenge we called 'The Peanut Butter Pit.' The task is to get the entire group from a start point to an end point across a boiling pit of sticky peanut butter/corrosive acid/radioactive sludge. Between the start line and the end line, the campers are not allowed to touch the ground. All they have to help them across are a series of evenly spaced cinder blocks in the middle of the pit, and two or three narrow but sturdy boards. The goal is to challenge both their cooperative and problem solving skills.

Generally, we did about three challenges over the course of a four week session, each one a little longer than the one before. The last and longest was generally supposed to take about one full day of camp, although there are legends about epic challenges that took three or four days to complete. Each challenge also came with a back story, usually involving counselors in costume breaking into circle time to enlist the campers help preventing some imminent threat to the camp, the world or the universe.

At the end of the challenge (and often in the middle of more difficult ones) counselors would lead group discussions about how things had gone, what worked and didn't work, and what they could take away from the experience and apply to other areas of life. They were given a chance to give a 'hats off' to members of the group who had been especially helpful, and were guided to the idea that a successful group effort requires both leaders and followers. Finally, the all gave each other a ceremonial pat on the back to congratulate themselves on a job well done.

As a counselor and a teacher, I took a number of lessons away from working with kids on these challenges:

1) Frustration is an important part of the learning process. Personal growth comes from overcoming challenges, even artificial ones. Students need to learn how to handle themselves when things don't come easily. If they can learn that lesson in the relatively safe environment of school, it will serve them well throughout their lives.

2) We learn lessons best when we explicitly talk about them. Somewhere in the teaching process, we need to have a conversation with the students about why they are doing the things they are doing, and what it is we hope they get out of it. The more we give them a chance to talk about the goals, and assess their own progress towards them, the better off they will be.

3) Sometimes students should just be left to figure stuff out for themselves. One of the key pieces to being a counselor in the challenges was to create a safe environment and then to leave them alone to figure out the solution. They need the confidence-building experience of being the ones to solve the problem on their own.

I'm not suggesting in all this that classroom time be taken away from academic pursuits and replaced with team building activities, but I do think that some of the structure of these challenges could be carried over into the classroom. Give the students a difficult task that stretches their abilities, allow them the chance to work through it on their own, even when it is frustrating, and then come back at the end and debrief. In this way, they not only learn the material, but they learn how to work and think independently.

What do you do to really challenge your students?

Summer Is No Vacation From Crazy Over-Involved Parents

Friday was the last day of my summer job as Assistant Director of the summer camp at the school where I have been working since January. I have three weeks mostly to myself before faculty meetings start at my new school. My long and involved to-do list prevents me from calling it a vacation, but the fact that my alarm clock won't be ringing at 6:00 AM for a few weeks is making me pretty happy at the moment. Most of my efforts over the next few weeks need to be focused on preparing for the new school year (I have a whole course curriculum to revamp before school starts), but before I move on to thoughts of September, I wanted to finish up with a few more summer camp themed posts. After all, it's not even August yet.

Saturday's New York Times ran this article about how the phenomenon of over-involved, over-protective parents has spilled over from schools into summer camps. The article focuses on how camps have been forced to hire full time parent liaisons to deal with the constant meddling of parents who are freaked out that their kids are eating too much/too little, not putting on enough sun screen, not making enough friends, or are simply not happy enough. For me, the most telling/depressing/amusing bit was about the parents who send their kids off to the woods with two cell phones, so that if the first one is found and confiscated, the kid will have a second phone hidden away and can still be reached. When the parents start conspiring with their kids to break the rules, camps (and schools, too) are in big trouble.

My job this summer was at a day camp, so the parental separation anxiety was not so much of an issue, but this didn't mean we avoided problems with over-involved parents. Take, for example, one little boy we will call Stephen. Stephen is one of those kids for whom ever little thing is a big deal. Stephen averaged at least one visit per day to the nurses office, almost always to show her (as if it had just been sustained) a cut or a bruise that was clearly many days old. This reached its most worrisome point when mom sent a vaguely threatening email asking why her son was coming home from camp every day with so many scratches and bruises.

On Friday, I was walking down the hall past the boys bathroom when the door opened a crack, and Stephen peeked out asking for help. I entered the bathroom to find Stephen entangled in a white dress shirt that, in his efforts to put it on, had become more like a straight jacket. That afternoon was the final performance for his week-long musical theater class, and he had spent the last ten minutes struggling to change into the black and white clothes he needed for the performance. I helped him untangle himself and get his arms through the appropriate sleeves, asked him if he could manage his pants by himself, and went back out into the hall. Five minutes later, Stephen was back at the door in his white shirt and underwear needing more help. His black pants were a couple of inches too long in the leg, not too mention too big at the waist, and he was completely baffled by this problem. I went back in, got him into his pants, rolled up the legs so that his feet were showing at the bottom, watched him struggle into his shoes, and sent him on his way, only fifteen minutes late to class.

An hour later, I went in to watch the performance of Stephen's class. They did adorable renditions of "I Just Can't Wait to be King" from The Lion King and "It's a Hard Knock Life" from Annie. There were many born performers in the class, but Stephen was not one of them. He spent most of the performance with his hands thrust deeply into the pockets of his over-sized pants, clearly trying as hard as he could to blend into the crowd.

Now, all of this would simply be a cute story about a shy and slightly immature kid who needed some work on confidence and self-reliance, but then mom showed up. First of all, let's point out that mom showed up at 2:00 for a 1:45 performance, which meant she arrived just in time to get stuck at the back of the 2:00 carpool line. Eventually she made her way in, picked up her son, and started walking with him back to her car. On their way to the car, Stephen apparently told his mom that all the kids had been laughing at him during the performance. It's important to know that there were no kids in the audience, only parents. All the kids in the room were much more focused on dancing and singing than on laughing at one of their classmates. That Stephen was embarrassed on stage was true, but had nothing to do with the reactions of anyone in the room.

Mom came storming back in, accosted me (the first adult she could find) and demanded to speak to the teacher in the class. When I told her that the teacher was already teaching her next class, she gave me one of those if-looks-could-kill kind of stares and informed me that she would be expecting a call from the teacher as soon as her class was over. Then she stormed out. Two hours later she was back. She had left Stephen to attend his final class of the day, and was there to pick him up from extended day. When I walked in, she had cornered the Director in our office, and was demanding (with only about half a dozen kids left on campus on the final day of camp) that we do something about how unhappy her son had been after the performance.

I'll leave it there, and just say that the Director handled the whole situation much more deftly than I ever would have done, reassuring the mom that her son was generally a happy kid, and that he had probably just been suffering from a little stage fright. The real point, though, is that this is not just one crazy mom who goes on the attack every time her child is a little upset. Every teacher (or camp counselor) could come up with half a dozen of these stories without even having to think very hard about it.

This is a real challenge for schools. One of the things we should be trying to accomplish is helping students grow up to be independent, self-reliant adults. Our ideal graduate should be someone who is ready to go off into the world and take care of himself when the need arises. The question becomes, then, how do we work with parents to let their kids grow up independently, even if that means that sometimes they are going to be unhappy?

Summer Camp: Making the Rules

Many of the things that make my former summer camp so unique have been a part of the camp essentially from its beginning. The two things I have talked about so far, appreciations and comfort and caring, are both aspects of the camp that I remember vividly from my days as a camper. One significant aspect of the camp that arrived between my time as a camper and my return as a counselor many years later was the camp constitution.

Schools and other programs for kids have a wide variety of approaches to setting the rules and getting kids to follow them, and no one way is perfect or appropriate for every situation, but I really like the way we went about creating the constitution. It was a multi-day process, and limited time spent on other activities during that time, but I think the rewards more than justified the time spent.

The first step was to get the kids thinking about the idea of community in general, and their place in various communities in particular. Each camper was given a badge, a circular piece of paper divided into three wedges, with space for their name in the middle. They were asked to think of three communities they were a part of. The counselors coached them through some possibilities: their school, their family, their sports teams, etc.. Then they were asked to think of a positive attribute that they brought to each of those communities, maybe something they did to be helpful at home or to be friendly at school. Once they had thought of their three attributes, they drew a picture in each section of the circle. Once completed, this badge represented them as a member of the new camp community that was re-created each summer.

Step two was to start coming up with the rules. They did this in small groups, so there was an opportunity to discuss and refine their ideas. One of the keys was that each rule needed to be phrased as a positive action. They had to say, "Respect other people's belongings," instead of, "Don't steal," or something similar.

Once the various groups had their suggested rules, the whole camp would come together to decide what should be included in the final draft. The rules were read out, and the campers were asked to raise any objections. The counselors leading the discussion were careful to steer the conversation toward objections to the ideas, not the wording. The idea was to build general consensus. At the end, everyone would make some symbolic sign of agreement (usually a hand motion with some silly sound effect) chosen by the kids. The final step was to put all the agreed upon rules onto a giant sheet of paper, and to attach the kid's badges to the paper as symbols of their role in the camp community.

Those of you who have been following along with these camp related posts will begin to see what I meant about certain cult-like, or at least ritualistic, aspects of the camp. But, having seen it in action, I have to say that this approach to creating the camp constitution was an incredibly powerful tool. When there was an problem with one of the kids, it was very effective to be able to remind him about the constitution discussion and why it was that the camp had chosen to include certain rules. It was like putting a judo move on a kid who was all prepared to get yelled at, and suddenly found himself explaining to you why what he did was wrong.

As with many of the things I talk about in this blog, I'm not a big believer in the idea that there is one and only one way to do things. When something seems to work, I look for the essential element that is making it work, and think about how that piece could be adapted to many different situations. In this case, I think the essential element comes from giving the kids a chance to help make the rules, and in doing so really think about their purpose. If the rules are something they have agreed to, and even helped create, they are much more likely to see the point in following them. It becomes not just about staying out of trouble, but about behaving as a responsible member of a community.

What effective ways of creating/enforcing the rules have you come across?

Summer Camp: Appreciations

Last week I mentioned that a lot of my inspiration for this blog comes from my time as a camper and counselor at a summer camp back home in Massachusetts. I described the somewhat cult-like devotion that the camp has from many of the campers and staff who have spent time there. This devotion is cultivated in the many community building activities built into the structure of the camp. The one I wanted to talk about today is appreciations.

The camp runs two four week sessions over the course of the summer. At the end of each session are a variety of activities designed to bring closure to the session, including an open house for parents to come and see what their children have been working on all summer, and a sleepover where the kids get to go for a night swim and stay up late watching movies. In addition, over the course of the last week, the kids do appreciations.

During the morning and afternoon circle times, the kids go to sit one by one in a chair that has been magically transformed into the Appreciation Chair. While there, they call on volunteers from the group to appreciate them, which is to say something positive about them. The kids are coached to make their appreciations meaningful. "I appreciate you because you're nice," is a bad appreciation, while, "I appreciate you because on the first day of camp, when I didn't know anyone, you came up and asked if I wanted to join your game," is a good appreciation. This is a situation where having older, experienced campers mixed in with the younger ones helps to set the tone, and to give good examples of how it's all supposed to work.

Again, as with many of the community building aspects of the camp, it can appear a little cheesy, but as an established routine, it is incredibly powerful. It is very unusual in life for someone of any age to be openly and publicly complimented by their peers. We don't often hear about the positive ways we have affected other people. Appreciations give kids a chance to see themselves in a whole new, and entirely positive, light.

One of the pieces we have to coach the kids through, is to recognize that being complimented is an inherently uncomfortable activity. We aren't used to it, and we often don't know how to respond. The kids are reminded to say thank you after each appreciation as a sign that they have heard and accepted the compliment.

The exact format of these appreciations might not work in every environment, but the idea is a powerful one that can and should be adapted to many situations. Kids spend a lot of time telling each other how they are different (read worse) than everyone else. Wouldn't it be nice if they had a regular opportunity to tell each other the ways in which they are great?

Summer Camp: Comfort and Caring

By a quick count, I think I have either attended or worked at six or seven different summer camps over the course of my life. Of all of them, one in particular has played a central role in my development as a person, as a teacher, and as a thinker about education. I first attended the camp (as always, I will avoid accurate names) in the summer between fourth and fifth grades. From that summer on, I and/or one of my siblings was a camper, counselor, or administrator there continuously until last summer, when for the first time in our adult lives, neither my sister nor I were working there, overall a streak of 22 years.

Among other significant life events that occurred at this camp, I met my wife while we were both working there in the summer of 2000, eight years ago this weekend. Since my wife's younger sister has been on staff at the camp for the past two summers, I count the family streak as still active at 24 years and counting.

While this family devotion is extreme, it is not actually exceptional. Many other people and families have similar stories and streaks, a fact that gives the camp a certain cult-like aura that many newcomers find off-putting at first. My wife often tells the story of her first day of staff orientation, at the end of which she went home wondering what the hell she had gotten herself into.

There are many aspects of the camp that lead to this bizarre devotion, and over the course of the summer I will spend some time on many of them, because I think if schools could cultivate similar feelings of attachment in their students, the job of education would be much easier. The most important of them, though, is that, more than any other environment for children that I have ever been a part of, this camp gives children a safe place to be their true selves. I have spoken with many young staff and campers who spend all year being miserable at school, feeling trapped in a place that doesn't understand them, waiting for summer to come so they can go out and find themselves again.

Again, there are many pieces in place to create this welcoming environment, but the first of them happens almost the moment that the campers arrive each day. Every morning, camp starts in a circle. The circle is a camp motif that is reinforced in many ways over the course of a day and the summer. Each circle is a mixed aged group, from fourth through eighth grades, plus counselors of a variety of ages and life stages.

Circle time begins with Comfort and Caring, a time for those who want to to share whatever is on their mind that morning. Usually it is light-hearted--stories of baseball games played, or new Pokemon cards acquired--but sometimes there is more vital information shared--a beloved pet passed away, a best friend gone to overnight camp for the summer. In addition to giving everyone the chance to share, and to feel like the events of their lives are important to other people, it is also a chance for the kids to get off their chests whatever thing has been occupying them. Once relieved of that burden, they are more ready to focus on the tasks of the day.

It can be a little hokey, and the oldest kids often roll their eyes at the prospect, but how much happier and more productive would we adults be if our days began with the chance to share with our colleagues the things that were exciting or depressing us that day, to ask for a little leeway when we missed our morning coffee, or to feel like our accomplishments were celebrated by the people with whom we spend our days. A little bit of hokey is not such a bad thing.

How Summer Camp Made Me Fall In Love With Teaching

Today was the first day of the summer program at my school. On the whole things went pretty smoothly, at least as far as I know at the moment. Unlike most summer camps, our students come in only for the classes that they are interested in. This leads to a rather complex pick up and drop off system with four distinct times for dropping the kids off, and then four more partially overlapping times for pick up. I call it a win that on the first day all the kids arrived and departed successfully and safely, especially with a thunder storm rolling in on us as the last students departed.

I mentioned in yesterday's post that working at a summer camp during college played a big part in my eventual decision to become a teacher. I thought today I would share the story because it is representative to me of what makes teaching so rewarding.

I was teaching Red Cross swimming as part of the sports camp at my former high school. My classes were small, usually about four or five kids of a similar level. My job in the four week session was to move them as far along towards their next swimming level as possible.

One of my classes was a group of girls going into third and fourth grades. They were relatively advanced for that age group, and were working towards their Level 5 card. In order to pass they had to demonstrate competence with the breaststroke (among other things).

One of the better overall swimmers in the group was a very outgoing and friendly girl, we'll call her Colleen. Colleen had crawl stroke down pat. She could do the elementary backstroke. She could tread water, and did a very confident forward dive into the deep end of the pool. But breaststroke was beyond her. We practiced the movements on land. We practiced the kick with a kick board. She could do all the pieces, but when it came time to put it all together in the water, Colleen just couldn't get it right. She just flopped around awkwardly, unable to move herself through the water. It was clear that she was going to finish the summer without getting her Level 5 card.

Then, on the second to last day of camp, Colleen hopped into the pool, and swam the breaststroke from one side to the other, perfectly and without stopping. Somehow, magically and overnight, Colleen had figured it out.

What amazed me at the time, and started me on the road to the career I love so much, is how happy it made me to watch her swim. She had worked so hard at it all summer, and all that work had paid off just in time. That joy in another person's accomplishment was a feeling I wanted to have again, and fortunately it is one I have had many times since.

There have been many frustrating days in my teaching career so far. I have sat with a pile of partially graded tests in front of me, thinking that if one more high school kid tried to tell me that Puerto Rico was a country in Europe I would quit right then and there. But overall, it is the students like Colleen, and the moments like that one watching her swim the breaststroke, that stick with me the most. As long as they bring me joy, I will continue to enjoy calling myself a teacher.

Summer camp is as American as...well, summer camp.

As I have mentioned before on this blog, my wife and I have spent most of the last three years living abroad, first in England and then in The Gambia. While in the U.K., I worked as an English instructor, teaching conversational English to businesspeople from all over the world, more than two dozen countries in all. This has led to a lot of time spent explaining America--or things American--to people who have seen the U.S. in movies, on TV, in the news, and even through a tourist's eyes, but still don't know quite what to make of it. I have tried to explain the rules of baseball and American football, shared bewilderment over how we possibly re-elected George Bush, and reassured people that neither Baywatch nor Beverly Hills 90210 is a realistic representation of life in America. Of all the topics I have had to cover again and again, though, the one that is met with the most confusion and wonder is the peculiarly American institution of summer camp.

The idea that children would escape from school, only to go straight into another environment entirely structured for them by adults, is completely bizarre to people from most other countries. It takes a lot of explaining, especially to get across the variety of things that we refer to as camp: overnight camps, sports camps, day camps, etc.. Summer in other countries is for vacationing with your family and for doing whatever you please at home. The idea of summer camp is so foreign that the Spanish language doesn't have an appropriate translation. The closest is campamento, which literally means something more like encampment.

I should be in as good a position as anyone to explain this whole summer camp thing. Not only have I had many of the usual childhood experiences with camps--the good, the bad, and the ugly--I have spent most of my summers, from college through my teaching career, working at a variety of camps. In fact, my experiences during my college summers teaching swimming lessons at my former high school played a big role in my decision to become a teacher. And yet, I don't know if I ever really managed to explain to all those non-Americans what camp is all about.

Today begins yet another summer working at a camp, in this case the summer program at the school where I've been teaching since January. It seems appropriate, then, to spend some time this summer blogging about the educating that takes place while the school doors are closed. Many of my own ideas about what an ideal school would look like were formed during my various summer jobs, so I won't be wandering far from the original purpose of this blog. Maybe along the way, I'll find just the right words to explain the peculiarly American phenomenon that is summer camp.

Computers Are Very Helpful If You Know How To Use Them

This week I have at least some responsibilities to three different jobs. First, there is my teaching job at my current school, where we are working through final faculty meetings. Then, there is my new school for the fall, who have asked me to come in tomorrow and get my bearings, pick up my books for next year, and start thinking about a curriculum development project for next year. The big one, though, is my role as Assistant Director for the summer program at my current school. Staff orientation is Friday afternoon, and the kids arrive on Monday morning, which gives me about 28 more hours to learn everything about a summer camp I've never worked at before. After that, I'm supposed to be one of the two most knowledgeable people about it. So, what did I spend my day doing yesterday: sorting t-shirts.

Let me explain.

On the first day of camp, every student gets a t-shirt with the camp logo on it. In the past, the t-shirts have always been distributed during the kids' first class. This is straightforward enough, except that, unlike other summer programs where all of the kids show up in the morning and stay all day, we have rolling attendance, depending on what classes each child is taking. They may be enrolled in anywhere from one to four classes per week, and are only required to attend the part of the day when their class is in session. This creates many logistical issues, but at 1:00 this afternoon, the one I was worried about was t-shirts.

About 80% of the campers have a class during the first period. I just had to find who the other 20% were and figure out when to get them their shirts. I decided that there must be an easy way to get our database to give me all of the relevant information, so that all I would have to do was make a quick count and start sorting shirts. Two problems: first, we are running the database on aged laptops with a weak wireless connection, a bad combination for the high powered online database we use; and second, I had never even logged into the database before this morning.

It took me about three hours to get a printout of all the class rosters for the first week with the kids' t-shirt sizes and class meeting times. Most of that time was spent learning to navigate the database and get it to produce whatever reports I wanted (and restarting it when it froze, and restarting it again when it froze again). It was good practice at a skill I needed to develop, and not quite as much of a waste of time as it sounds, but it was still three hours.

I know this has been said many times, but computers really are great time savers, once you know how to use them. That learning curve, though, can be rough. I know that the time I spent today will pay off later when I have other, more critical things to do with the database, but I spent most of the afternoon feeling like I was running on a treadmill. I wonder how long it would have taken me, without the help of the database, to do all the work I tried to get the computer to do. I bet today I could have done it faster. Hopefully, next time the computer will win.