It is purely a testament to how well this model works, and nothing to do with my skills, that this week turned out really well. Overall, I felt really out of practice. It’s been almost a full year since I’ve done any work with WAS, and it took me up until Wednesday afternoon to remember that *Blindfolds Are Magic*. I remember now that that used to be my number one trick in previous years. When you can’t get a group of kids to calm down and focus, just put blindfolds on them. I’m guessing this works with adults too. By Thursday at lunchtime, they were willing to take the Lunch Challenge, and a group of eleven 6- and 7-year olds actually chose to spend their whole lunchtime blindfolded and silent. Can you even imagine!?

And I remembered also, that sometimes you have to let kids fail at an activity before they’re willing to learn how to make it work. If the challenge is for them to all line up alphabetically without talking, and I can see that there’s no way it’s going to work, it’s so hard not to help. But if I just tell them where to stand in line, then they haven’t learned anything except that they aren’t capable and they should rely always on adults to tell them how to figure things out. If I let them fail at it, and then we talk about why it didn’t work (that part’s the key), then they’ll be able to do it themselves the next time. And when I say “talk about it”, I really mean that. Even this group of six-year olds can tell me exactly what went wrong (“everyone was telling everyone else what to do, but not doing it themselves” “No one would agree on which side was the beginning, even though it didn’t matter” “some people were pushing”). I don’t need to lecture them on what they should do differently, but have a genuine dialogue where everyone gets a chance to say what their experience was, and I maybe subtly highlight some key points (“so, are you saying that next time everyone should agree on where the beginning is before they start trying to get in line?”)

So the way that I got them to *want* to try a blindfolded lunch was to try a silent-but-not-blindfolded lunch first. The goal was to make it all the way through lunch without talking. If you’ve worked with kids, you know how unlikely this is. One kid makes faces at another, the other giggles, a third kid hisses at the second one to be quiet, a fourth kid sees a bug, and soon all hell has broken loose. I was actually surprised that they made it ten minutes the first time, but someone couldn’t help remarking about the cricket they found in the dirt. So the next day, when the subject of the silent lunch came up again (they were trying to earn the chance to make a fire on Friday), I offered the blindfolds (introduced as part of a fun game earlier in the day, so they were already familiar with them) as a way to make the challenge easier. If your friend is making faces at you, you won’t know. And so we spent a really nice 25 minutes sitting in the grass, in the dappled shade, spread out from each other a ways (far enough that one kid couldn’t “accidentally” bump into another kid), eating our lunches and feeling the breeze. When I told them that it was time and they could take their blindfolds off whenever they were ready, one kid took off his blindfold and looked around in wonder. “That was so beautiful!” he said. Another one chose to leave hers on for another 10 minutes or so.

Hobostripper wrote recently about making God human in the strip club, and that’s how she knows she can do anything. I know I can do anything because I can get eleven 6-year old kids to *want* to sit silently for 25 minutes. And both of us, Tara and I, are teaching people how to be human. Hopefully, if they learn how to be truly present in the world, and in their bodies, and in community, now, then they won’t need to be taught the hard way later, when someone like Tara has to take away all their cash in order to show them what’s real.

So a snake-handling faith-healer and a Presbyterian minister walk into a tent revival meeting…

If you don’t get why that’s the setup for a hilarious joke, you might not get the rest of this post, and possibly you won’t understand why I spent a week of rock climbing and camping in the desert feeling like an uptight Presbyterian surrounded by people speaking in tongues and writhing in the aisles. I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I would be working as a camping/climbing instructor for a group of sophomore girls. You can read in that link about my intentions to just model enthusiasm and competence, rather than try to “teach” anything. Things didn’t turn out quite as I had planned.

All the instructors get together for two days before the trip starts to plan the trip and make sure we’re on the same page as far as boundaries and rules (can the girls have their own snacks, do we eat meals together, how do we decide who’s turn it is to clean up the kitchen, etc.). The rest of the staff is all amazing, well-qualified, and fabulous. There are 6 instructors (2 to a team) as well as 2 rock specialists who will be there for part of the time setting up climbs and monitoring big picture site safety. 5 of the instructors and one of the rock specialists are women, one of the instructors identifies as genderqueer, and one of the rock specialists is a man.

The first sign of conflict happens in the first day when one of the instructors points out that the male rock specialist is going to have to really be aware of the fucked-up ways that all these sophomore girls are going to want to interact with him. He is an attractive rock climber in his late 20’s with a South African accent. He says he’s aware of that, and will be careful to be appropriate, but “at the same time, I won’t emasculate myself”. You could watch the hackles go up on the hardcore feminists in the room. This women’s empowerment stuff tends to attract fairly hardcore types (not necessarily feminists, but hardcore climbers, hardcore survivalists, just really intense alpha personalities in general). In this group, 3 of the women had worked together extensively before, two of the three were in a committed relationship (with each other), and all three considered “smash the patriarchy” to be an apt description of their basic platform. Wow. Try being the one man in that crowd, and find a way to not be emasculated.

Instructor teams had been decided for us, and we broke into those teams to get to know a bit about the person with whom we would be sharing responsibility for the physical and emotional safety of ten 16-year old girls in the desert for the next 5 days. I will call my partner Ashley, in part because that satisfies a childish and petty desire to call her something that I think would bother her, but mostly just to avoid using real names. Ashley and I are really different people. She’s a radical feminist, a lesbian in a committed relationship with another instructor on the course, a recovering alcoholic with tendencies toward anxiety and obsessive behavior, and has been running girls’ empowerment and wilderness courses for around 6 years. By the end of the course, I came to respect many things about her, and I learned a lot about different styles but, like the Presbyterian at the revival meeting, there was so much about her style that made me really uncomfortable.

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When I was in high school I went through a rebellious phase that involved regularly attending the local Assembly of God church and trying to bait my mother into debates about whether evolution was a supportable scientific theory. I went to church every week, and “got saved” (at least three times, cuz I was afraid that it wasn’t sticking), and went up for altar calls, and spoke in tongues at summer camp one year, and had a mad crush on the youth pastor (who later dropped out of the church and hit on me). At that same summer camp where I first spoke in tongues, we had a particularly charismatic motivational speaker. One evening, just as he was building up to a great climax, he suddenly stopped and focussed intently on someone sitting on the other side of the stage from me. I couldn’t see who he was looking at, but I heard the speaker say, still holding the microphone up to his mouth, “Is that your wife?” He was pointing at someone that I couldn’t see, but since we were all high school kids it’s unlikely that the boy was sitting next to his wife. I couldn’t hear his response, but he must have muttered that she was not. The speaker, notching it up a level both in volume and pitch, asked, “Are you going to marry her?!” The boy, probably wishing he could sink down below his seat, must have muttered something non-committal.

“THEN GET YOUR ARM OFF OF SOME OTHER MAN’S WIFE!!” the speaker yelled.

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After our first day of rock-climbing with the girls, we all stood in a circle to offer appreciations to each other. As you felt called, you could say something that you were really impressed by or thankful for from the day of rockclimbing. The girls said things like, I really appreciated how everyone cheered for me when I didn’t think I could go any further. After several appreciations, one girl said, “I appreciate Rob’s accent” and all the girls giggled. Ashley stepped forward into the circle, animated and pissed.

“There are girls here who rock-climbed for the very first time today, and ALL YOU CAN THINK ABOUT IS THAT ONE MAN!!” And she says “that one man” in the same way you might say “that turd that the cat knocked out of the litterbox”.

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I thought Ashley’s point was a good and valid one. In fact, I supported her intentions throughout the trip. But her approach made me so uncomfortable, with its roots in emotional manipulation, that I had a rough time playing along. Her approach was all about the emotional build-up, creating a scenario where the participant really starts to see how fucked-up they are, how undeserving, how sinful, (or in this case) how intolerant, how middle class, how brainwashed by society. And when you have people genuinely freaked out, you offer them an amazing solution, you throw out the altar call, you tell them what they need to do to be all right. If this had been church camp, we would have told them that they need to accept Jesus as their lord and personal savior. Since this was about girls empowerment and breaking down cliques within their class, we told them that they should eat lunch with the Asian students and stop acting stupid around boys.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally in support of breaking down cliques and not acting stupid around boys. For that matter, I’ve got no problem with folks practicing Christianity. I just don’t think that emotional manipulation is a very effective way to create long-lasting change. And I think it’s dishonest and, well, manipulative. Everything about Ashley’s approach to the week was about creating a situation where the students would be out of their element and vulnerable. They would not be allowed to go into their tents until bedtime; they would not be allowed access to their personal snacks except at one regular time after dinner (this is a big issue when half of the students are from asian countries and the only food we are offering is mac and cheese and pb&j); everyone must wait for everyone to have food at each meal before eating; there will be no downtime or time for personal reflection or journaling; we will run one “trust exercise” after another during times when we aren’t climbing or eating; etc.

There is no doubt that these are effective ways of creating community and breaking down barriers. When you make people emotionally vulnerable, make the group the only possible means of support, and create a situation where people will feel physically unsafe (like rock-climbing), you will have a rock-solid group of supportive girls after three days. But will you have a rock-solid community after 30 days, when they are back in their comfort zones with their pre-existing means of support?

Obviously, there are a lot of charismatic Christians out there, so this must be an approach that works for people.  The emotional build-up and catharsis of it must be effective for people, but I never found it so. That’s why I kept having to get “re-saved”.  The effects never lasted much longer than a few weeks past summer camp. Pretty soon, alone in my bedroom trying to pray, I would start to wonder what was the point of speaking in tongues anyway? If I didn’t even know what I was saying, could I possibly mean it? Why would God care what language I pray in anyway? And actually, while we’re at it, why would God even care if I pray? It’s not like he doesn’t know what I’m thinking, right? And why would God care what I’m thinking, since he already knows what I will do with my whole life? And that doesn’t even really make sense, so maybe this whole thing doesn’t make sense…and pretty soon I had headed down the dark tunnel to sin and iniquity, or at least to wearing too much lipstick and hanging out with the stoners.

These girls have been indoctrinated in the marketing of women’s empowerment from early on. It’s a pervasive part of our culture to give lip service to women’s equality in order to
sell shampoo, or tampons. (”Shouldn’t you be leading a carefree life?”) These girls know how to talk the talk, they know all the right answers, just like I knew how to explain to people how speaking in tongues is a valuable gift from God. But I didn’t believe it, and I don’t think these girls believe it either. And all you get with the emotional approach is people who feel it for a while, but there’s no intellectual commitment to it. The fervor fades. They’ve never seen anyone living it in the long-term.

On the last morning, I offered that if anyone wanted to get up early enough to climb a nearby bluff with me and watch the sunrise, I would be willing to wake people up for that. All but one of the girls agreed, and we woke up at 5am to hike up the hill in the dark and watch the sunrise. We sat, scattered in our own spots, while the sun came up over the far-off and flat horizon, past the freeway and the powerlines receding into the distance.

Afterwards we talked about the things we had seen and heard, and mostly about the things we thought about while we sat. Many of the girls had very interesting things to say, but the one who, unknowingly, had a message for me was the girl from Korea who said, “I mostly didn’t think about anything, I just wondered how the sun would rise. I have never seen the sun rise before.”

My mind was blown. Can you imagine never having seen the sunrise? Not even being sure *how* it rises? I felt really ashamed of how much I take for granted. I didn’t admit to them that mostly what I had been thinking, while we sat, was that I wish something good would happen. All there is is the sunrise and some cliff swallows calling, and I wish something really *exciting* would happen. Her thought made me realize, how freaking exciting is it that the sun rises every day!? How amazing is it that I have the opportunity to sit here on a windy desert cliff and watch it in silence with a group of people whose minds are blown by the simple fact that it is happening!?

And that was the most real thing that happened all week. And I was glad that I had a chance to share with them a real experience, one where a regular person chooses to get out of bed before dawn and experience the real world. Because that is what I believe in. I don’t particularly care about smashing patriarchy, or about who you share your lunch with. But I do care about creating connections, between people and people, between people and earth. If I had to choose something to smash, it would be civilization, and the idea that people need to be coerced into caring about each other and the world, and the fact that people don’t care enough about the sunrise to have ever seen one. I believe in the sunrise.

Next week, I will be heading out to the desert with a group of sophomore girls for the second year in a row. I wrote about it last year and I hope for it to be as good this year. Mostly, I am really looking forward to some camping and being outside. I am hoping to go into it with the idea of just modeling excitement about being there, and less intent to actually “teach” anything. I think I am moving further and further away from the idea that kids need to be taught. Mostly, they learn exactly what they need to if you can just create space where adults will step back and let them learn. And also model that the “cool” thing to do is to learn new stuff. The more I learn about skateboard culture, the more I realize that these kids are incredibly motivated to learn new things and strive to attain goals. No one has to force them or grade them or ground them if they don’t practice for a certain number of hours every day. And mostly that’s because people that they like and respect have modeled for them that skating is cool and worth pursuing. People who make money on skate-related products do so because they utilize the voices of those role models to encourage skaters to keep pursuing their goals.

I think educators could learn a lot from those marketers. And I realize what a crazy thing that is to say.

So anyway, I’ll be out in the desert camping and climbing for the next week. Possibly there will be stories when I get back. Also possibly there will be pictures of knitting and spinning that I will be working on during the drive. Also possibly there will be pictures of the garden that I started this morning.

(I am thinking of giving this to my current employers, but am worried that it seems a little harsh (see final bullet point below). What do you think? I’ve been working with the family for about a month already, so they already have some sense of who I am and what I believe in.)

• I am interested in acting as a facilitator of self-sufficiency. I am not interested in waiting on people. If I am doing my job well, it might look as though I’m not doing much at all. I believe that your children are capable of cleaning up after themselves, making their own toast, packing their own backpacks, pouring their own cereal, and rinsing their own dishes. I do not choose to do those things for them, but to help them learn how to do it for themselves.

• I believe in having clear boundaries and consistently enforcing them. Your kids will not be confused about what I expect from them.

• I believe in allowing kids to learn by experiencing the (safe) natural consequences of their actions. If they choose to wear sweatpants to the beach, then they will have to deal with having wet clingy pants. This will not hurt them. I will stop them from doing things that damage themselves or others or the environment. I recognize that my role is somewhat different than yours in this area.

• My role is different than yours. No doubt, this is self-evident. But I want to say it because there will no doubt be times that you are frustrated that I made a different decision than you would have. I am not a parent. Ideally, I would be a sort of respected (but still groovy) auntie. If there are boundaries that are very important to you (like which clothes kids are allowed to wear to the beach), you will need to be sure that those are communicated to me clearly.

• I do not see it as my role to keep your kids comfortable at all times. In fact, they will almost certainly be uncomfortably wet, muddy, tired, or bored at times. They will also almost certainly be joyously wet and muddy and too tired to even tell you about all the adventures we had today. You can’t have one without the other. I intend to push their boundaries because that is how people grow. Growth is often uncomfortable.

• Speaking of mud. Your kids will get muddy. You should be prepared for this. I bring an extra change of clothes with me to work every day. Your kids should have clothes that it is okay to get muddy, and they should be responsible for knowing which clothes those are. We will even spend a lot of time outside in the winter, even in the rain, so they should have warm clothes that it’s okay to get muddy. I will take responsibility for helping your kids clean those clothes properly so that you don’t have to deal with muddy clothes in the house.

• I like computer games, and I come from a generation that spends far more time on the internet than a lot of folks would consider healthy. In my previous life as a web designer, I spent 8 hours a day online and then came home and spent another 4 or 5 hours online during my personal time, mostly doing such “unproductive” things as learning how to build community via online games and how to engage in friendships via online bulletin boards. Therefore, I am unlikely to be as concerned as you are that your children spend hours online doing “unproductive” things. If you have a specific time limit that you would like me to enforce, I am glad to do so.

• I believe in encouraging kids to think for themselves. This often has unexpected results, which you should be prepared for. Once kids start thinking for themselves, they often start questioning the reasoning of the people who used to do their thinking for them. In most cases, that is you. Your kids will do this anyway, whether someone encourages it or not. I intend to teach your kids reasonable and respectful ways to question authority, but be aware that I believe in questioning authority.

• I believe in honoring kids’ need to relax. Don’t expect me to have your kids actively engaged at all times. Just like grown-ups, kids need space to just zone out and not make decisions or engage with other people. Particularly during the school year, no part of their day is designed to just give them some space with no expectations. As someone who has really high space requirements, I see this as something really important that I can give to your kids.

• I also believe in honoring kids’ natural curiosity and desire to explore. Expect that I will figure out what excites your kids and that I will encourage them to (safely) pursue those things. Excited about fire? Let’s learn how to make fire by rubbing sticks together (and let’s also talk about fire safety and responsibility to one’s community while we’re at it). Excited about berries? Let’s see how many different kinds of edible berries we can find (and talk a little about ecology and thankfulness while we’re at it).

• Know that I am not a naturally outgoing and charismatic person. It will take me a while to get to know your kids, and it will take them a while to realize that I do, after all, have a sense of humor. For that matter, it will probably take you and I a while to figure out how we relate to each other.

• I love working with kids. I am excited to get to know your kids in particular. I look forward to learning a lot from your family. Creating relationships is a slow process for me, but it is a rewarding process. I hope that my relationship with your kids will be rewarding for everyone involved.

• I am a blunt (some would say tactless) person. If you want me to know something, I won’t get it if you try to be subtle. I take feedback and criticism well, so please just say it like it is. I will try to provide feedback to you in the manner that you would like to hear it, but be aware that I am not good at tact and subtlety. If I say something that seems harsh, please try to hear it as coming from a place of good intentions. If you don’t understand where I’m coming from, please say so.

Rather than the Apples and Onions approach to the wrap-up, I’m going to switch to “Rose, Thorn, Bud”. The Rose moment is obvious, as is the Thorn. The Bud refers to that small something that you hope will grow into something beautiful, but so far is just the suggestion of a flower.

Rose: My Rose for the whole summer is hard to pick. I’m not even sure if I should go with one of those beautiful little vignettes that captures a small moment but symbolizes a lot, or if I should try to explain the overall sense of fabulousness I felt this summer. This Apple from Week Two was definitely one of the overall high points. I learned a lot this summer about how to interact with kids as people, rather than as kids. Not sure if that makes sense to people who don’t already work with kids. But there is such a magical thing that happens for me when I treat kids as peers. They act like peers. And in many cases, they know more than I do about whatever we’re doing anyway. Kids who have been to four years of WAS camps are probably better at making friction fires than I am, and they are possibly better at finding berries, and they usually know a plant or two that I don’t know, and they are almost certainly better than me at catching snakes. Since these are all things that I would like to be better at, it’s easy to approach them as the experts, and this seems to be something that they don’t get much in the rest of their lives. If I recall correctly, childhood involves dealing with a long line of ignorant and condescending adults. So when I left the kids in charge of their own experiences, extraordinary things happened. Like when a whole group of 11 kids decided that they wanted to see how silently they could walk down a trail. We spaced out so we were just out of sight from each other and foxwalked for a solid 20 minutes. (These kids were ages 10 and 11…can you imagine eleven 10-year old kids being silent in the woods for 20 minutes by their own choice!?) They were so silent that a winter wren 5 feet off the trail was still singing by the time I, at the end of the line, meandered past. In that same group, two kids saw a weasel at different times. And at the end of the week the whole group witnessed a bird alarm traveling through a blackberry thicket, culminating in the last two kids in line seeing the bobcat emerge from the end of the thicket. And they all knew what the bird alarm was without me saying anything.

John C, the director of the Summer Camp programs, says that he often has parents complain that we don’t actually “teach” their kids anything. We have all these opportunities to teach them the names of birds and animals and trees and ecology and blah blah blah but instead we just wander around in the woods with them. John consistently tells each parent to take their kids for a walk in the woods before they make a judgement about what they learned during the week. And consistently the parents come back apologetically, amazed at how much their kids tell them about the woods as they walk through it. John tells the story as an illustration of what he calls the “invisible school”. That kids don’t realize that they are learning anything, so when parents ask “What did you learn today?” they get no answers. And after spending a week with us in the “invisible school” they actually know tons of information about wild edible plants, and what to do for stinging nettle stings, and the difference between dog tracks and cat tracks, and about a billion other things. But here’s what I’m wondering after this summer: Do we actually teach them that stuff? Or do we just start, after a week, to hear them saying the stuff that they’ve known all along?

Thorn: I had really consistently good experiences with the kids, so my thorn has to be my continued sense of disconnection from the community that surrounds WAS. It is a closed system, and not much room for outskirters. Each Friday was a wrenching sense of grief at saying goodbye to the group of instructors I had come to respect and value through the week, knowing that none of them would make an effort to continue that relationship outside of work. It was easier this year, since I was prepared for it and made better plans for supporting myself with friends and family outside of work, but it is still emotionally tiring to grieve the loss of a community every Friday, and then turn around and create a new connection with that community (different instructors, same community) every Monday. It is necessary to create that connection in order to do the job all week; instructors rely on each other heavily. And it is necessary to break that connection every Friday. It’s a rough way to spend a summer.

Bud: The bud came in this last week, in which I was taking pictures in exchange for getting to attend the Art of Mentoring class. I have been working within this model for the last couple years that I’ve been working with the school, but I hadn’t ever taken the class where they actually lay out all the components of the model and explain them all. I highly highly recommend it to anyone reading this who works with kids, or has kids, or has nieces and nephews, or teaches adults, or basically lives in this world. There were many many pieces that made a lot of sense to me, but the particular one that I’ve grabbed on to is one of those “oh duh! Why didn’t I realize that!?” sort of things.

Basically, there are two ways to get new information into your brain. You can drop facts into the “In” box, and if there is a spot within your existing understanding of the world where that fact fits, it will stick. A lot of information just filters right on through. You can also create a spot for new information by triggering a “fight or flight” response in conjunction with this information. You are a lot more likely to remember something that you learned while in an adrenalated state. For the first few weeks that I’ve been working with the siblings at my new job, I’ve felt like I’m just dropping all of this really cool information into a bottomless well. There’s no resistance to it, but there’s no sense that it’s ever lodged anywhere. And it totally makes sense to me that the way to get information to stick is to present it in terms of challenges. The house is on the beach so…”I bet I can capture more female crabs than you can in the next 5 minutes!” And then there’s a reason for the sexing of crabs to matter, and where you’re mostly likely to find crabs is relevant, and does any kind of crab count, or does it have to be a particular kind…how can you tell the difference? Or, in the grocery store, “close your eyes. What color was the hair of the last person who passed us? Where they wearing a necklace? Were their ears pierced?” and now there’s a reason to pay attention to your surroundings (not to mention something to keep them engaged while doing something as lame as grocery shopping with the nanny). I’m excited about this, and I hope it turns into something amazing. I’m excited to have this new tool, which I totally should have thought of sooner.

I know there was a request for additional stories from the camps, but I’m afraid none of the details are coming to me right now. As they come to me, I’ll post them, so I guess you’ll just have to keep reading throughout the year

I haven’t ever been able to post pictures of my work here. Obviously, there’s the issue of permission from the kid’s parents, and also the fact that the pictures are for the Wilderness Awareness School Website. But here are a couple that I won’t be giving to the school (for obvious reasons), and I really like them anyway.

I just got paid $42 for walking on the beach and playing Eagle Eye for a couple hours! And I’m going to continue getting paid for that for pretty much as long as I want, up to 8 years. I landed a job as a tutor/mentor/nanny to a family with three kids. The two boys are 10 and 13 years old, the daughter is developmentally disabled and 20 years old. I was a little nervous about the disability part, but I was honest about that with the parents and they seem cool with me learning as I go. Today was a “getting-to-know-you” sort of a day. I just spent a couple hours with the kids while Jan (the mom) went for a long walk. They live in a nice house and their backyard is, quite literally, the Nisqually Delta. We spent some time down there on the beach, and then played Eagle Eye (a hide-n-seek type game) in their yard. I’m pretty stoked about it. I’ll start doing it consistently when summer camps are over, in about three weeks.

Setting the Scene:

I have ten kids this week, ranging from 9 years to 12 years old. I don’t have an assistant, so I’m on my own. This makes it somewhat complicated to get bathroom breaks, but so far is working out just fine. Two of the kids are siblings, and another one is on adderal (used to treat ADD, ADHD, and depression, but I don’t know specifically what it’s for with this kid). They’re all good kids.

Onions:

The kids were all great. My only frustration was with the other instructors and assistants for the week. All of them are men except for one assistant and the director, and none of them seemed to understand why it was a problem that all of our stories for the week feature strong male protagonists and only men had told stories for the week. Even after we had an explicit conversation about this on Wednesday, Thursday morning came around and the men were all voting for a male instructor to tell the story of the Peacemaker, which is a great story, but includes only men with the exception of one woman who is an innkeeper and doesn’t do anything spectacular. I had to get kind of pushy in order to insist that we at least needed a woman to tell a story. We finally came around to both the female assistant and the director telling a personal story rather than one of our mythological ones. But still all the men seemed non-plussed about why I was getting so uppity about it. It’s definitley not universal, but I think the field of wilderness education tends to be a little behind the times in terms of female equality and awareness of male privilege.

Apples:

Definitely today was the biggest apple, though it started out looking like quite an onion. After our large group of 45 kids or so broke up into smaller clans to head out into the woods for the day, one of my kids stayed behind sitting in the big meadow while the rest of us headed out to get our water bottles refilled and collect our backpacks. This week’s camp director, Amara, stayed behind to find out what was up with him. He told her that he didn’t have any friends here and he was really sad because people weren’t being nice to him. She passed that on to me and suggested that she would simply move him to another group. He’s one of the younger ones in my group, so would possibly fit in better with the next younger clan. After spending three days with this group, I had seen that they were actually extraordinarily good at being supportive. While it does often happen that one kid gets ostracized from the group because the others decide they just don’t like him, I didn’t think that had happened in this case. The kid in question is a really quiet kid, tends to get lost in the excitement, and I was pretty sure that they had no idea he felt left out. I told Amara that I’d rather risk having a talk about it within my group. It’s a risk, there always being the possibility that the left out person feels even more left out after the conversation. I told Amara that I would ask the kid (I’ll call him J) if he felt up for having that conversation. He said he was, and I told him that was very brave. He asked for some tissue and a couple minutes to get himself together and then the rest of the group would come over and we would talk.

I spent a few minutes with the rest of the group. I didn’t tell them what the problem was, since I wanted J to have a chance to speak for himself. I just told them that one of our clan members wasn’t feeling very supported and he was taking a few minutes to decide what he wanted to say and then we were going to have a talk about it. When J was ready, we circled up and I asked J if he would say to the group what he had said to me. He said, “I don’t like the way you all treat me, and I think you should treat me better.” I asked him if he could give any specific examples and he said he couldn’t. I was worried that we might not be able to get anywhere with that, but one of the students starting asking really good questions. “Do you feel left out?” she asked, “Or do you feel like we are being mean to you?” She asked it completely matter-of-fact, not defensive at all. He explained that he just felt left out. And what followed just made my heart melt. First, I asked the whole group to just quickly do a show of hands if they had ever felt this way themselves. All of them raised their hands, and totally empathized right from the start. All the kids in the group were so amazingly good about verbalizing their thoughts about how J is totally part of the group (one girl said, “J you’re a really cool kid, you can participate in whatever we’re doing whenever you want.” and another said, “Of course you can do whatever we’re doing. We’re all on the same team.”) I pointed out to them that some people really need to be specifically invited in order to feel comfortable; I even explained that I’m one of those people. After a few minutes conversation, we all came to an agreement that the whole group would make it a point to invite J more often to participate in whatever they were doing, and J would try his best to let people know if he wanted to participate but wasn’t sure if he was invited. And then, even more amazing than the fact that this group of kids was able to have the conversation, they actually did it! Even the kid who is most focussed on his own agenda and talking over everyone else all the time made it a point to holler, “Come on J!” every time he went running off down the trail. All the kids made it a point to sit next to him at lunch, or to walk next to him across the field and ask about where he was going fishing after camp (which he was really excited about), and even created a special job for him when we were building a shelter and he hurt his knee and couldn’t run around to collect materials. It was awesome.

And there were so many times the rest of the day that I had to  hide my chuckles. J is obviously a kid who doesn’t get invited to play very much. He’s not particularly coordinated, doesn’t really get rough-housing, and doesn’t pick up on a lot of social protocol. So at some point, there were a group of kids and one of them had a ball, like a tennis ball or something. Somehow, they created some sort of keep-away game with the ball (I love how kids are always creating spontaneous games), so one kid had the ball and all the
others were chasing him and tackling him to try to get the ball. A kid standing next to J saw what was going on and took off across the field to joint the pursuit. “Come on J!” he hollered as he ran.  J took off running all knock-kneed and joyful across the field. When he caught up to the kid with the ball, already weighted down with three or four people trying to pry the ball away from him, J stops abruptly not quite knowing what to do. He understands the overall point of the game, which is just to tackle people and rough-house around. But he doesn’t quite get the pretend-point of the game, which is to get the ball. So he pauses for a second, and then just throws his arms around the person nearest him and starts wrestling them to the ground. Fortunately, in the melee, this didn’t really stand out to anyone involved as the whole tangled knot of 6 or 7 kids went down in a pile of flailing legs and laughter.

I’m reviving the “apples and onions” posts that I used to do for my Youth School internship because I can’t possibly keep up with posting about all the really cool (and occasional pretty devastating) things that happen in the course of a week of summer camp. Apples are a symbol of those moments that are just super sweet. Onions are things that have lots of layers and sometimes make you cry and maybe need a little processing before they’re really edible. I will probably post these “apples and onions” posts on Thursdays because I’ll drive home after work on Fridays and not feel like posting over the weekend.

So, for week one, it’s been a really amazing week. It feels really good for this to be my second year. I’m so much more laid-back about things. I know I’m good at this, so I don’t feel anxious all the time that I’m forgetting something important. Only about half the time. There have been at least eleventy-two really sweet moments this week. But the big picture one is that I have a kid in my group who I also had last year. (A little context: I have a group of 11 kids, ranging from 9 to 12 years old. 3 of them are girls, and all the oldest ones are boys. One of the boys has Asperger’s Syndrome. One is on medication for anxiety (and I would be anxious too, if I had his mother). They’re all good kids.) The kid that I know from last year has turned into a so much more pleasant human being. Last year, he was so annoying that we ended up having a group meeting (between the students) to talk about it. Things had deteriorated to the point of him being annoying, and all the other kids yelling at him to shut up. So we had a council about it and had to talk specifically about whether or not he wanted to change that behavior and whether or not the other students would be willing to help him with that change. It was pretty rough. This year, he totally rocks. His desire to be the center of attention has mellowed from the acting out of last year to a real talent for leadership. He has a way of being so engaged and excited about whatever he’s doing that the other kids just naturally want to do it too. It’s really cool to be able to see that progress. Usually, I just get to see them for one intense week and then I never know any more about them.

And a bonus apple moment: This was just one of those little moments. We were off trail, climbing on a fallen log. We were definitely pushing some boundaries for some of the kids, since they were pretty uncomfortable getting scratches on their legs and stuff. There was a certain amount of whining going on, which I was pretending not to hear. To get off the log, each kid had to jump-step down into a bit of a brush pile. 2 or 3 kids in front of me, I saw one of the girls jump down and lose her balance. She grabbed a nearby branch to try to balance herself, but that branch wasn’t really attached to anything. In slow motion, I watch her teeter backwards past the balance point and fall on her back in the brush pile, pulling the large branch over on top of herself. I hear her take a deep breath, and I brace myself for bad things to happen. “Oh my god!” she says. “This is SO COMFORTABLE!” And I just couldn’t help but laugh at her laying there on her backpack like a stuck turtle in this brushpile.

Onions: Well, it says a lot that I can’t really think of any off the top of my head. The Asperger’s kid is, predictably, somewhat hard to deal with. He likes to pretend that he doesn’t hear me, but is actually too smart for his own good. Fortunately, his mom is cool and we’ve come up with a system where I get to have some control over the number of minutes he is allowed to use his Gameboy after he gets home. As my mom says, it’s all about the leverage. So really, I can’t get that to count as an onion either. Hmm, I guess I don’t really have any onions this week. Like I said, it’s been a great week.

Overheard during the girls’ arrival in the desert: “This is so fucking retarded!”

Overheard while the girls waited for the bus to come pick them up after 4 days in the desert: “I am so totally coming back here!”

I think that mostly sums up the experience. It was hard and awesome. There were 8 women on as staff out in the field, plus two more women who came on the 2nd and 3rd day to be our rock climbing specialists. The 8 core staff spent Saturday and Sunday prepping for the program. None of us had worked together before, so it was our chance to get to know each other’s style a little bit, to create a curriculum that utilized our strengths, and to decide on various “united front” issues (do we care if they cuss? what’s the policy on personal disclosures? etc…).

The women were amazing. One runs her own teen girl rock climbing program in Bend. Another manages the local climbing gym. One just got back from 10 months of working wilderness therapy programs in Maine (”I’ve slept on the ground far more often than in a bed in the last 10 months,” she said.). Anyway, they all rocked. It was so refreshing to be back in an environment where people understand the consensus process and use it effectively. It highlighted for me one of the reasons that I love wilderness education work; it seems like that level of respectful interaction is a lot more common among wilderness educators.

On Monday, we headed out to Vantage, WA and a local climbing site. Staff drove out in a van together with all the gear and the girls left from their school in Tacoma in their buses. Staff got to the site a couple hours before the girls so we could get our site set up a little bit and get a little bit grounded in the space before we were “on”. The girls’ arrival could be felt as a palpable ball of angst and fear hidden under a thin veneer of contempt. We started with a group game, a bit of running to shake out the kinks of the bus ride, but the instructor leading the game called a halt to it after not too long. Later, she explained that the punching and kicking going on on her side of the field were getting out of hand.

We split into our small groups. Sets of 8 to ten students and two instructors camped in the same general vicinity, but far enough away to be distinct. As the students settled in and had a chance to ask their questions (”what will we do if there’s an earthquake?”) they mellowed and at least seemed ready to accept their fate, even if they weren’t happy about having to spent the next couple days in the desert (”where are all the cute boys?”). We explained how things were going to work for the next few days, including how to pee in the desert. Peeing and pooping outside is something that most of these girls had never even thought of doing before. Those of you who’ve done it (probably most of the people who read this blog) know that they’ve been missing out, but they were pretty sceptical.

Wilderness educators in general seem to be pretty open about bodily functions. You’ve gotta be pretty okay with talking about poop if you’re going to work either with kids or in the woods. Combine the two (kids and woods, not kids and poop, although that works too), and you have a recipe for non-stop inappropriate staff jokes. In this instance, a couple of the girls announced that they weren’t going to poop until they got back home. In a staff-only conversation about that, one of the instructors said, “If there’s one thing that will ruin a camping trip, it’s a little fecal impaction.” Those of you who do wilderness education already understand how that was hilarious. Those of you who don’t won’t think it was funny no matter how much I try to explain (Preston gave me the “mm-hmm, that’s nice dear” look when I told him the story); suffice to say that Team Fecal Impaction became our official staff group name, used only when students weren’t around. We even had a team cheer, which it would be impossible to appreciate in written form.

The first night was a little rough for some of the girls. We had given them the basic run-down about how to set up the sleeping pads and sleeping bags, but we hadn’t realized to what extent they just had no experience whatsoever with any kind of camping. My co-instructor, Lina, woke up sometime in the wee hours of the morning with the hunch that some of the girls were cold. She got up to check on them and found that indeed they were all awake and freezing. She hooked them up with extra warm stuff to wear and got them settled so they could make it through the night. (I slept blissfully through the whole thing, even though Lina and I were sharing a tent. I was in my fancy new sleeping bag, bought just before this trip with xmas money, and for the first time EVER I was able to sleep through the night on a camping trip because I didn’t wake up with the feeling that my feet were about to just shatter and fall right off of my legs because they were so cold.)

The next morning, we found that most of them hadn’t known how to inflate their Thermarests correctly, or hadn’t had their sleeping bags zipped up (!), or various other things that we totally take for granted. So I hauled out my Sleeping Bag of Blissful Repose and also my Thermarest and gave a little demo while they had breakfast the next morning. You have to inflate the pad, and zip the sleeping bag up (all the way!), and it works better to put your clothes in the sleeping bag with you than it does to put more clothes on your body, and look at this nifty little drawstring so that I can close up everything but a little breathing hole! After that demo, and the fact that Lina started putting butter in everything we ate (including hot cocoa) in order to up people’s metabolisms, the girls all slept warm through the nights also, even though it was clear and cold in the desert at night.

On the second day, half the students went rock-climbing and the other half went exploring on a nearby mesa. It was a beautiful sunny day, and we were totally blessed with the weather. Even a desert-hater such as myself was basking in all that sunlight and warmth. It was our turn for climbing the first day, and every girl climbed, most of them more than once, even if they were afraid of heights. On of the girls in my group later explained that even though she was really scared, it was such an amazing view from the top of the climb that she made herself hang there in the harness for a minute so that she could look around. As you would expect, it was an amazing experience for all the girls, and I didn’t hear anyone say anything about it being retarded.

The next day was exploration day for us. This was the one big frustrating moment for me of the whole trip, because it tied in with my big issue with compulsory school in general. I’ve written before about how traditional school systems (in the modern European meaning of the word “traditional”, not in the “native to this area” meaning) create people who don’t believe they are capable of making rational decisions about their own safety and well-being. One of the things I love about wilderness education is the amount of personal responsibility placed on the kids, and how amazingly well they all do with it. So on the morning of that third day the 4 staff people involved in the exploration got together to create our gameplan for the day. We also had with us one of the school chaperones, a science teacher who none of the girls really liked. The chaperone was joining us for the day and was sitting in on the planning. We had heard in the report from the previous day that the other group hadn’t enjoyed the hike very much. One of the reasons was that the path was fairly rocky (all that manky lava rock everywhere), so they felt like all they could see was their own feet and the feet of the person in front of them. In our planning meeting that morning, I suggested that we start out the day with a quick lesson in foxwalking so that they could walk and look at the scenery at the same time. The chaperone immediately jumped in and said she thought it was really important that they students all watch where they are walking. “It’s a dangerous trail; I wouldn’t want anyone to fall down,” she insisted. Keep in mind we are talking about high school sophomores here. When I tried to explain how foxwalking allows you to look around AND not fall down at the same time (and believe me, if I can do it, then it doesn’t take much coordination), she insisted that she thought it was really important that everyone look at their feet while they walk. Finally, another instructor suggested that we could just teach it to them as an option, and if they felt like the ground was rocky then they could choose to look at their feet, whichever they preferred.

I get so frustrated when dealing with people who want to micro-manage every part of an experience for people who are younger than them. I’ve struggled with this a lot as I work in the public schools. The students have been taught that they aren’t capable of handling personal responsibility, which puts me in the awkward position of having to enforce rules that I don’t agree with in order to accomplish my job (to teach a fun science program) without children bouncing off the walls. My first exposure to the public school system’s military approach (which you’ve already read about if you followed the link above to my previous writing) had me all up in arms about the demeaning way the kids were treated.

However, that same school that I wrote about also ended up being one of the first classes that I taught when I started this job. Consistently, the kids were well-behaved and easy to deal with. They were engaged, curious, intelligent, and respectful. “Well, maybe I’m wrong,” I thought. “Maybe kids need a lot of structure at this stage in order to be successful.” And consistently over time in different schools around the area, I’ve found that the kids given the most freedom were hardest to deal with, while the kids with what seemed like excessive structure were polite and respectful and much easier to teach.

But a new school recently dinged the bell that most of you have probably already heard. In the first class I taught there, the kids were eerily silent. I actually ran out of science material and ended up killing a bunch of time at the end of the class, which has never happened to me before. It has also never happened to me before that I had a group of kids wait in line for something and they remained absolutely silent the whole time. No talking among friends, or even any arguing about who was trying to take cuts. Nothing. I ended up using up all my material while they stood silently in line waiting patiently for me to hot glue their color mixers together. It was weird, but I thought maybe it was just an off week.

The next week was the same. If you’ve read Watership Down, then you’ll know what I mean when I got the sense that they were just tharn. (If you haven’t read Watership Down, go immediately to your local library and check it out. My brother has a theory that part of the reason we are the way we are is that when everyone else’s parents were reading them Dick and Jane bedtime stories, our mom was reading us “children’s stories” (wink, wink) about the search for a utopian society. It’s a really good book.) The students all sat perfectly still; they didn’t talk out of turn or without raising their hands. They also didn’t ask questions, nor where they particularly interested in answering questions posed to them. There was no spark in their eyes. It was during this second class that I noticed the sign next to the classroom door saying, “No Bathroom Breaks 15 Minutes Before Or After Recess!” While I understand the reasoning, it’s exactly this kind of stupid rule that I hate about the micro-managing schools. Because what if I have to go pee and I can’t hold it for 10 minutes? Are you going to make me stand here and pee my pants in the classroom? How do you know whether I’m telling the truth or not? Are you saying that you know my body better than I do? Are you saying that my opinions about what my body needs are meaningless? Are you saying that I have no say over what happens to my body? How fucked up is that?

But whatever, lots of schools have similar rules, so I still didn’t get the connection until the third class. As some of you may remember from elementary school, elementary teachers often decorate their classroom doors. Often in the fall they put up the construction-paper-leaves, winter is the snowflakes, spring is the little pots of construction-paper-daffodils. You remember. And often there will be some inspirational quote included. You know, like the kind they put on inspirational posters. “Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall.” Well, on the day of the my third visit to the school, one of the classrooms had a newly decorated door. I don’t even remember how it was decorated because the inspirational quote dominated the whole door. Written in the height of horizontal construction paper, so letters 8 inches tall, and taking up most of the door was this saying.

“A classroom without rules is like a zoo without cages.”

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…

WTF!!!!????

This is wrong on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to start. When I passed it on to some Mad Science co-workers they started brainstorming equivalent “inspirational” quotes. “A classroom without rules is like a prison without beatings.” “A classroom without rules is like a mental ward without straightjackets and electro-shock therapy.”

Also on that same day I overheard two of the teachers talking about how hard their classes were to control that day. “If you give them even 5 minutes of free time, it’s impossible to get them under control again,” one of them said. I taught my class and left the school really bummed out about the potential for positive change in future generations. And that’s when it all gelled for me about my confusion with the militaristic schools versus the freedom-encouraging schools. The super-structured schools DO make kids easier to deal with. It makes them polite and attentive. However, this is not the way to make good grown-ups. We have a societal picture of what a “good kid” looks like. This kid does their homework without complaint, helps around the house, never challenges authority, conforms to social norms like cleanliness and appropriate attire, gets good grades, and gets along well with others. And that kid is WAY easier to deal with, so I can certainly understand why that has become our social ideal. However, that kid grows up to be a person who accepts the status quo without thought, who never challenges authority or tries to improve circumstances, who conforms to social norms without thought, and who doesn’t see themselves as capable of independent thought or action. On the other hand, the kids who can’t stay in their seats, who are so excited about whatever we’re talking about that they have to blurt out their answers RIGHT AWAY, the kids who suspect that they might actually know more than their teachers, and who have the freedom to use the damn bathroom whenever they need to…well, yes, they are harder to deal with. Just the same as it’s always harder to deal with autonomous beings. Consensus decision-making is way harder than dictatorial decree. But those kids grow up to be the kind of citizens I want to have in the country where I live.

Fortunately, before I had a chance to go off on that diatribe with the science teacher in the desert on the third day of our trip (did you remember that that’s where we were?), one of my co-instructors figured out how to work around it and we all agreed on a way that would allow us to give the students their own power (choose to foxwalk or not, as you prefer) and short-circuited the teacher’s dictatorial tendencies.

The exploration was good, the desert was beautiful, and the girls enjoyed the various team-building challenges we had set up (blindfold walk, handcuffs, etc.). After dinner, all the groups got back together around the campfire and Trisha led something called an Appreciation Circle. When she originally described how it was going to work, it seemed, you know, nice, but not that amazing. So you might not be able to appreciate how really cool it ws from just this written description. Basically, everyone sat in a circle with their eyes closed. A few girls at a time were selected to stand up. Then the staff would call out some quality, “Touch someone who you think is very courageous.” Then the standing girls would have a chance to go around the circle and touch however many people they thought were courageous. After a couple of qualities, those girls would sit down and close their eyes with everyone else. The staff would pick a few more girls and call out a few different qualities. This continued until each girl had had a chance to stand up and give her appreciations. At this age in particular, it seems really hard for kids to give honest appreciations of each other. This way, it’s anonymous and they seem freer to express themselves. And it’s intense to be sitting there with your eyes closed and having people touching you for things you didn’t know people thought about you, for being funny or strong or a good leader. It was nice.

The fourth morning, we got up and packed up camp. We had a quick appreciation circle in our small groups. I wanted to demonstrate for them what it looks like to give someone an appreciation when it’s not anonymous. So we sat in a circle and Lina (my co-instructor) and I both told each of the 7 girls in our group something that we were really impressed with about them in the last couple days. Then they packed their lunches for the bus ride home and we spent the rest of the morning picking up camp and hauling gear over to the bus pick-up point. Then we drove back to Seattle in the van, spent around 4 hours unpacking gear, washing dishes, sorting leftover food, and debriefing the trip. We tried explaining to Stacy (the course director, who had not been on the trip) about Team Fecal Impaction, but apparently you had to actually be there.