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by Jeffrey Leiken, M.A.
Tell your campers stories. Give them the rich gift they are missing
when they stare at a screen. The stories do not
need to be great — just
tell them.
By the time your campers arrive, you will be oriented to how camp works,
what is expected of you, and how to manage some of the camper challenges
that you will inevitably face — like homesickness and bullying.
If you want to be a really good counselor, listen carefully to what
they tell you, really learn what they teach, and put all of it into
practice.
If you want to be a great counselor — the kind who positively
stands out from the masses — listen carefully to the message you'll
hear that says "always be willing to ask for help," and
put that into practice along with all the many
others.
If, however, you want to become one of
the truly great counselors, the rare kind who makes
a lasting and substantial difference not just in a child's
summer but often in his or her whole life, there
are important things you can do.
Make It Magical
for the Masses in the Middle
By the time the first
day of camp is over, you'll be able
to recognize the campers who are most likely to
be your challenging ones and those who will easily
become everyone's favorites.
As happens in schools,
certain kids quickly get noticed for being more
challenging. Typically, they are the defiant, mischievous
ones, the kids who clearly lack social skills to connect with their
peers, the ones who wander off when they should be with the group, or
the ones who withdraw and become sullen and nonparticipatory. Because
of the risk and concerns these kids bring, you will have to deal with
them immediately, and they will demand your time and energy.
Likewise,
there are certain kids who possess a unique kind
of charisma and charm that makes them incredibly likeable. They are
often motivated to do anything and will approach things with a positive
attitude, an authentic curiosity, and a willingness to wait their turn
and be cooperative. You'll
think to yourself "I wish they
all were like this," and it is normal to find yourself drawn to
them, giving them more attention. Likely, they
will seek it out as well.
The truly great counselors,
though, are the ones who recognize the masses in
the middle. They are careful to ensure that they focus their attention,
time, and energy on these kids too. They do this even though these kids
are not necessarily as easy to connect with (you'll often have
to do more work to engage them) and even though
it is easy to justify not putting the extra "over
and above" time in with them because they seem to be doing fine.
Remember, the masses in the middle are often used
to being the masses in the middle.
They are used
to sitting quietly while the problem kids get attended
to and sitting back watching while the charismatic kids get more attention
and accolades. They tend to think of themselves as being more ordinary.
This is not to suggest that they are secretly troubled, but rather to
point out that these are the kids who tend to spend more time being
content playing with their peers and/ or in their own thoughts, and
who have little experience of the profound impact a relationship with
the right adults can make. Often these kids have the potential to really
blossom and thrive when they are given proper attention, support, and
encouragement from caring adults who truly see them not just for whom
they are, but for whom they could be.
Be the one who does.
Tell Them
Stories — Especially
at Bedtime, Even When They Are Teens
Albert Einstein
credits his parents telling him stories as a child
as the key to his creativity and genius that emerged
as an adult. He said, "If you
want your kids to be intelligent, tell them fairy
tales. If you want them to be really intelligent,
tell them lots of fairy tales."
It
is hard to discuss this topic without sounding
too trite or sounding like a course in advanced
neurobiology. Let me just say it the way I see
it: television and video games make you dull. Beyond the more than one
thousand studies that have effectively proven the direct link between
viewing violent and/ or sexual images and an increase in more violent
activity and more indiscriminate sexually activity at younger ages,
(Did you know the U.S. Army uses violent video games to train soldiers
to be desensitized to killing?) is a deeper, even more concerning reality.
Spending four to six hours a day staring at screens (the national average
for your demographic in 2008, and what will add up to being almost twenty
years of your life) inhibits vital brain development that will be critical
to being able to sustain focus over a long period of time and developing
your capacity to think creatively.
In the case of what you are doing
this summer, simply consider this: Have you ever
read a book that you really liked, only to see the movie version of
it and be disappointed?
This is because when you read or are told stories,
you activate specific areas of the right hemisphere
of your brain that enables you to create your own images, voices, tastes,
smells, and physical sensations. When I say, "Imagine a warm freshly
baked chocolate chip cookie that is just coming out of the oven," immediately
everyone reading this imagines a different oven,
a different cookie with its own unique smells and
tastes. If though I just show you a picture of the cookie, I remove
your individuality and creativity and all of you will have the same
image in mind.
The experience of imagining creatively versus processing
what is imposed upon you takes you from the three-dimensional
world of rich, full sensorial experience to the kind of one- and two-dimensional
data that you are often bored to tears with in
school. In the extreme (which happens more than you may think), you've
gone from being vibrantly engaged and charged to dull, unthinking,
and complacent. People, for whom these elements
of the brain continue to be underutilized, lose
access to them by the time they are in their mid-twenties. Scary, isn't
it?
The oldest tradition in human society is that
of telling stories. Long before there was writing
to record these stories, wisdom, morals, and critical
skills were taught by elders telling stories to
youth. This was typically done while sitting around the campfire beneath
the stars in the darkest hours of the night. Being in the presence of
one who does this with you, immediately engages what are often underutilized
corners of your mind and often makes you begin to feel more alive.
Tell
your campers stories. Give them the rich gift they
are missing when they stare at a screen. The stories do not need to
be great — just
tell them. Obviously keep them age-appropriate.
Stories that come from books you read or experiences
you had as a child are perfect.
One of my favorites
is a true story I started telling eight-year-olds
about a hike a group of my neighborhood friends and I took when I was
about twelve. We wandered deep into the woods behind our neighborhood
and after hours of hiking and climbing to the top of a steep tree-covered
hill, we found an old rusted 1940s gangster style car that had been
abandoned forty years earlier. That story was so well received in camp
that the fifteen-year-olds wanted to hear it too! In fact, some of them,
now in their mid thirties who are still in contact with me, remind me
about how cool it was to sit there in the dark at night and hear about
that car and what we found inside its glove box . . . .
Share and Show
Your Passion
Share and show your passion, unapologetically
and largely unedited — and
use this to create a world for your campers this summer the way it could
be.
We live in a culture that in so many ways has
become passionless. Many people are skeptics and
cynics and settle for a "live for
now" attitude that revolves around thrills and
adrenaline highs without substance, depth, and true fulfillment.
There is a great line from an obscure early Tom
Hanks film called Joe Versus the Volcano (Warner
Bros. Pictures 1990). Hanks is an office worker, going to work each
day in his windowless office in the basement of a building accompanied
by hundreds of others who are just mindlessly moving through their days;
all of whom are surviving but living without passion and joy. Hanks
sits in his chair and notices that the sole on his shoe is coming apart.
He begins to pull at it. A co-worker walks in and asks him something
to which Hanks looks up and replies, "I'm losing my sole" — which
of course could easily have been spelled "soul."
It is a
poignant metaphor and a moment that spoke to many
of my generation (I am forty and came of age in
the early 1980s). We knew that if we weren't
careful, our fate would not be much different.
The irony is that those in your generation who,
until this recent economic downturn, have grown
up with so much, have found a different source of pressure that saps
at your "sole" — the pressure
and competition to excel in school and be "the best" at
everything. For many more than would willingly admit, there is also
a more ubiquitous and less expressed pressure to be at the top of the
social game, to look good, and do everything right to ensure that you
are associated with the right crowd and are always included. Many of
your campers experience this as well, and many in fact, see this stress
in their parents' lives
as well.
I have long said that those who can grow
up in common culture, go through our education
system, achieve all the markers they are told are
essential to their ability to succeed, and still retain their sense
of wonder, joy, and true enthusiasm for life and learning are truly
fortunate.
Choose to Be Extraordinary
What does all this have to do
with your work with campers this summer? A lot.
You are at camp — not in that other world
that values so much of all the things that offer so little.
You do not
need to play by those rules now. In fact, as long
as you stay within the parameters of the camp's expectations and are
aligned with the camp's mission, you have tremendous latitude to make
your own rules.
You can create an environment in your bunk that excludes
superficial chatter about things that don't matter — like
how people look and how many points they scored. You can create an environment
in which how much people laugh and how deeply they connect is what's
really important. You can create an environment in which who you dance
with and how you dance does not matter, but rather one in which everyone
feels safe just to dance.
To do any of these things — and the
countless others you can create in your ideal environment — requires
your commitment to ensuring your campers understand that this summer
will be different. It requires your passion — the kind of passion
that sets an example, that motivates others, and
that encourages your campers to rise above setbacks and challenges and
to pursue an extraordinary life.
You can make a difference. This is
your opportunity. This is your summer. Choose to
make it extraordinary. Please.
Reference
Joe Versus the Volcano. Motion Picture. Directed by
John Patrick Shanley. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1990.
Originally published in the 2009 May/June
issue of Camping Magazine.
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