Stormy the Nature Specialist.

Garter snake hatchlings, 2010.

The very first post of this blog was my story before I was a camp counselor.  It’s my background and why I would ever want to pick a camp to work at for a summer, let alone aspire to make a career of it.  

My second summer after starting college I wanted to take online classes, but I also wanted to live on the other side of the state instead of moving to my parent’s new house several states from all my friends.  I moved in temporarily with a friend, and needed to find a job before settling for the entire summer.  I came across an advert on Craigslist (of all places to advertise for camp!) and remembered how happy I was at camp as a child.  I applied and was hired as a counselor and CIT (counselor in training) director.  I got a quick tour of camp a week before staff training and felt it would be an excellent summer.  

And it was!  It was an incredibly small staff, the 19 of us (including the kitchen staff and two rangers!) and a small amount of girls each week, but it worked. There were highs and lows, but it was a great summer to remember.  

Why did I want to become a Nature Specialist after that summer?  That goes back to my childhood camping days.  At my camp there was a nature director named “Nature Boy” and he taught me more each summer about everything, nature and art and books and otherwise, than I could have ever imagined as a kid. He was one of the handful of counselors I wanted to see summer after summer.  As the youngest child, daughter of a veterinarian, and generally outdoorsy girl I loved everything outside.  The bugs, the trees, the animals – everything.  As a child I had a growing collection of “found” items like rabbit jaws and deer antlers and skulls.  Where some found it creepy, I found it immensely interesting to learn about them.  

Let’s go back to my first summer as a camp counselor – there were so few of us that we all did our own programming.  Nature, Art, Sports, all of it was done by unit staff, no directors or specialists.  We did well, we had good supplies, but I really felt like I couldn’t guarantee a quality program for every unit, I could only do it for mine, and I felt that wasn’t fair.  The next year in school I took more science classes and applied at a new camp for the Nature Specialist position. 

Even now as a Program Director I have a deep soft spot for nature programming because kids are really out of tune to what’s outside these days. Oh, and I have a real love for teaching on night hikes.


-Stormy

Goose on the Loose.

I haven't updated in SO LONG! I apologize! I do promise that I will try to update as much as possible in the new year, it's my non-resolution. Let's be honest, no one keeps those and just as many of you readers will be doing this summer, I too will likely be unable to update very often in camping season.

I still have a new post here though! I have decided to expand authorship, and the "I" is now "we." Now you'll be reading posts on various subjects in camp life from myself, Stormy, and from my good camp friend Goose. The following has been written by her and will act as her introduction. A little taste of the Goose life, where she's coming from, etc.

- Stormy

"Hi, I'm Goose, and I'm the art director..."

In the spring of 2007, I wandered into a summer job fair at the university I was attending at the time. Being located in the mountains of North Carolina, there were a LOT of camps in attendance. My ambitions were a bit nebulous at that time--I knew that I wanted to work at a camp, but I didn't really know what I wanted beyond that.
There was an entire boardroom dedicated to the camps in attendance. Boy Scout camps, Girl Scout camps, YMCA camps, private camps. I took every flyer that was handed to me and wrote down my name and number and email address approximately 5,732 times (or so it felt by the time I was done). I shoved applications into the notebook I was carrying and away I went.

I filled out applications, I did phone interviews. I had my eye on a lush, beautiful private girls' camp south and west of Asheville. But the director of a Girl Scout residential camp a couple hours east of Asheville talked me into coming down one weekend to take a tour of the camp...and to interview me. She told me she'd call me no later than the beginning of May and let me know something.

So I waited (and that private girls' camp sent me a polite rejection letter). The first week in May, I was out and about with my best friend when my phone rang. It was that director, calling to offer me the position of. . .

. . . art director.

My reaction was one of surprise. I said yes without thinking, and when I got off the phone, I turned to my best friend and said, "What did I just agree to?"

When I initially applied, I thought that I wanted to be a regular camp counselor. I had put down art specialist as my second choice because, well, why not? I had taken a lot of art classes in high school, I grew up doing a lot of arts and crafts with my mom and in various other settings. I never thought I'd get hired to do THAT over chasing kids around all day. But there I was, a contract in hand agreeing to do. . . what, exactly?

My first day at camp, the director took me down to the little craft house on the lake, handed me a stack of badge books and a key, told me the camp ranger would be bringing me an air conditioner at some point, pointed out a handful of things that she was hoping I'd find useful (which I suspected was code for "make these go away somehow, but creatively") and told me to have fun as she walked out the door.

In arts and crafts, your instructions are mostly commonly in the form of a vague wave and "Just...come up with something". Hot glue sticks are worth their weight in gold. Wax is best scraped off the floor, table and wall with a popsicle stick. Your coworkers aren't trying to prank you if they stuff dryer lint in your camp mailbox...most of the time. Don't ever throw away broken crayons, you can use them in a hundred different ways. Neither your staff nor your campers will EVER get tired of doing tie-dye, even if you do. Glass jars are not a good substitute for crafts calling for plastic bottles. You're going to find paint on your elbow two weeks after you leave camp. You will be cleaning from the day you start till the day you quit, and people will expect miracles.

Welcome to arts and crafts. This is my life.


- Goose

The Seven Absolutes of Camp Counseling

     I made this handy graphic at the beginning of summer to post in my camp’s staff house. It’s all stuff we cover in staff training but anyone who has worked at camp can tell you that counselors are human too.  We sometimes forget the really important stuff come week seven, when we are so tired, so burned out on songs and games, and so easily pushed to behacing just like our seven year old campers.  It happens. 

    

    That’s why it’s SO important for administrative staff to help their unit staff. Boost morale. Make sure they’re getting breaks. Make sure they are getting water! As them if they are feeling OK.  It’s the small stuff and we’ll talk about this more in-depth soon.

    So, I posted this in the staff house as a reminder. This is, however, just the brief version.  These “absolutes” are from a much longer article from the ACA’s Camping Magazine.  While I find some of them aren’t entirely “absolute,” they should still be followed 90% of the time. 

Follow the jump for the full article, then tell me what YOU think counselors must ALWAYS remember! Are these the same as your list? What would you change?