#91. Leadership Camp (Wednesday, April 11, 2007)

What was your best day…of just being outdoors?

Time to go camping! Every year the students’ council at my high school put together a Leadership Camp, basically a three-day retreat in a cabin somewhere in the nearby wilderness, for about sixty freshmen to hang out while taking part in these “skill-building” sessions led by older students. This year, I was selected as one of twelve skill-builders.¹ And as this was my first experience in any sort of counselor role, the whole thing was great from start to finish. A few highlights:

I (junior) was paired up with this girl Lara (senior), who was extremely bubbly (she was the female lead in our school’s production of “Guys and Dolls”) so she kind of took the lead on all the exercises for our group of eight.
Each activity session was centered on a theme, e.g. Listening, Communication, Polyadics (which involved us lying in sleeping bags in a dark room and talking about whatever we felt like). I had gone to the Camp myself in my freshman year and recalled some of the material in the booklet had been lifted from Sean Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens, which I had a copy of—so I brought it over and awkwardly added in my own exercises from it, to mixed results. (Most notably, a reading of “The Cold Within”, which, in my view at least, is one of the most beautiful short poems nobody’s ever heard of.)
There were two kind-of-strange but cool life-lesson exercises (that had also been done in my year). The first one, we set up this game with taped squares on the ground, and the team members were supposed to find a path across the squares without hitting any “mines”. The thing was, there was no actual rule to the mines—Lara and I would just go beep whenever we felt like it—which obviously created a lot of annoyance…which was the whole point. The whole lesson was to not get worked up over small things. (We revealed the chicanery in the end.)
The other one, we blindfolded the kids and taped a maze of string with no endpoint, and told them to try and find their way to the “end”. The idea was that once a kid asked one of us for help, they had completed the exercise and we would remove the blindfold; the obvious moral being, ask for help when you need it.
We played commando² one night in the big forest and field outside. The ponds were all iced over. At one point, I saw one of the kids, Chris, try to make his way across the pond…then the ice broke and he fell in and started shouting for help. Of course, the pond was just a foot deep, but I went over, pulled him out, and brought him inside, “saving him” apparently (as he put it).
The freshmen all bunked together in one room for the guys, one for the girls. Literally, one big room would have four long platforms each containing seven or so bunk-beds merged together into one. It honestly looked like the coolest thing ever³. I tried to exert some power late at night by going in multiple times to tell the boys to be quiet and go to sleep, with no expectation that I was actually going to be listened to.

Just a nice, fun three days camping out in the woods. Made all the better when you’re one of the people in charge.

Thanks to a good word from my friend and trivia buddy Brian Hurst (#118), plus a nice Rorschach (superhero) analogy in my application.
This giant manhunt/tag-like game that’s tons of fun when played with a large group of people and in the dark.
Though the set-up for us skill-builders was also pretty neat, with us sleeping on giant mattresses in the main hall.