So what do we do in Staff Training Week? We bond as a team with numerous leadership activities. We take workshops in First Aid, Teaching Strategies, how to run fabulous camp activities, Tech Theatre, First Aid, Health and Safety, WHMIS, microphone use, potential camper issues, running great dorm activities and much, much more! We play water games, decorate our dorms, set up program rooms, call our campers, enter all the medical data, practise camp traditions, go over program plans… and all this in just one week, while also moving truckloads of supplies to camp and turning a boarding school into a funky arts community!
We also do something we call ‘Meal Breakouts’. These are short snippets of training information. How to manage different food sensitivities. Anti-Bullying policies. Diversity. And this morning, camp policies on technology. Katie, our new assistant director, asked all returning staff to bring laptops, cell phones and portable music devices to breakfast, and to sit between all the new campers. Throughout breakfast, they ignored their camp colleagues, pretending to text and listen to music instead. The point was to illustrate the divisive effect technology would have on community, if it was used everywhere and regularly, and allowed to bring the outside world and its problems constantly into our circle. Katie had intended to debrief this ‘role play’ afterwards… but in the middle of breakfast one of our new counsellors jumped up and seized a microphone. She said that camp no longer felt like camp when there were so many other things standing between her and all her friends – music, text messaging, social media, calls to friends at home. She talked to everyone about how disturbing it felt… without being aware that the situation was ‘rigged’. But what a wonderful illustration of the strengths of our new staff… that without waiting for anyone else to do so, they knew when to speak out against something that didn’t feel right. That’s the most important thing I need to know, as a camp parent myself… that at camp, there will always be someone able to speak out and advocate for my kid. And at Centauri, trust me, there is.
Please bring us your children tomorrow. We are eager to get started on a terrific summer, and completely ready for them – ALL WE NEED NOW IS OUR CAMPERS!