Summer Camp During Covid｜Three Things for Teachers
I finished my last week of Summer Camp. I’ve been our camp director at Dinoto Karate Center for years, but this camp season was different… because coronavirus.
I’m still processing everything that I’ve learned—a book will be coming out eventually. There are a few things that I need to share with my teacher friends before I have time to write the book. They are entering the battlefield that I just left. I cannot neglect them. I am not afforded the opportunity of time.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet
Aristotle
Below are three things I learned during this year’s camp season. If they aren’t educational, I hope that they are at least entertaining.
Discipline Fatigue
I’ve never been a rule heavy teacher don’t get me wrong I cover the basics:
Be kind and include everyone
Keep your hands to yourself
No put-downs
I just refuse to be the teacher wasting my time on what color backpack the kids can have….I’d rather teach.
My goal is to only enforce rules that are important. Thus, I rarely draw a hard line unless it affects the students physical or mental health. There are a few instances that I make a rule that is necessary for the campers learning, but those are rare.
This year wasn’t different. The problem is that the list of rules that were needed to protect kids grew and grew.
Wear gloves when playing some games
Don’t play with your gloves
Don’t blow air into the gloves
Don’t lick your gloves
Don’t eat your gloves
Stay in your square
Many of our activities were designed around personal areas for the kids to stay socially distanced
Don’t lean out of your square
No sharing
No trading cards
No sharing markers
No throwing things back and forth
The kids handled these rules like champions. Partially because I told them that if we can’t follow these rules, we aren’t allowed to have camp this year. A fact that nobody—myself included—really needed to be reminded of. There was a problem—still.
Most of the tools I use to disguise repetition and help the kiddos listen were upended.
The kids were exhausted by all the rules. So was I. Somewhere something was bound to give. Since the safety rules couldn’t budge an inch, their ability to stay focused suffered. Admittedly, anxiety tends to do that. It felt like something more. The kids struggled with the overbearing amount of structure that suddenly entered their lives.
If the campers were struggling to stay on track, I was okay with decreasing the complexity of our activities. There was a constant balance between active, rule-heavy games and the campers’ ability to keep everything straight in their head.
Giving the campers room to explore their new safety rules was the right decision. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.
New Standards
One of the things I struggled with everyday of the camp was that I needed to change my expectations. Camp would not be like last year; I knew that when I started.
What I didn’t expect was that the camp would change daily after it had begun. My imagination of our program was just… wrong.
Every day I had to adjust my expectations until I stopped having them at all. Instead I started listening to what my campers were saying and doing. The second that I did that, the camp became something more.
This isn’t the right article to go into trauma, post-traumatic growth, or play therapy. I did get to watch all those things start happening moment by moment.
The less I framed the activities and games, the more the kids were able to be creative.
My campers started to invent games on their own. This isn’t exactly surprising. What was surprising was that the activities they made consistently followed the best safety practices for the virus.
With constraints on how they could play, they still made it happen. Which also meant that they became more and more engaged with each other. Since goal number one of my camp is to foster social skills, it was a dream.
Fighting the Dragon
At some point you must address the Dragon in the room.
I know, they’re usually elephants. The virus seems much too scary and tricky to be an elephant. Also, I’m a dork.
You and your students are likely wearing masks. The kids may have a hybrid schedule. No matter how much we want to insulate them from everything going on in the world, they already know.
The younger kids didn’t always have the words to describe the difference in the zeitgeist. They still felt it.
The older students were swimming in too much information. My omni-directional anxiety was remarkably like theirs. I just had more ten cent SAT words to explain it with.
You might not want to fight the dragon. I didn’t want to. The pitfalls of politics and parental expectations are boiling. It is easy to burn yourself. Even if I knew the direction to go with the conversation, there were a lot of ways that I could mess this up.
I thought for days about what to say. I asked myself:
Is my voice needed here?
Is what I have to say worth saying?
Does speaking risk more harm than good?
Pedagogically, I couldn’t avoid the dragon. It would have been an injustice to completely ignore it.
I had two points:
This too shall pass
Make the most of what now is.
When I told them that an end to the virus would come, I got one big question, “When?”
That’s a tough question. I told them that I didn’t know, but that I knew that it would. How you handle that question is up to you. Just know that it is coming.
The second part was less painful, but more difficult to get across. My point was that they should make sure that they aren’t in an indefinite holding pattern. Progress somewhere must happen, whatever that means.
How you face the dragon is up to you of course. He is lurking though.
Thank-you
To all my fellow teacher’s. I hope this is at least interesting to you, even if it isn’t useful. Leave some comments about what you’re learning about kids and teaching below. This will be a year to remember.
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