Camp Ain't School...But School Wants To Be Like Camp
Several seasons ago, Hunter, a staff member who was a former camper, came running across campus after observing an assembled group of boys who were seated, listening (or not) to a counselor going on a bit too long about the rules to some game. “Look, look!”, he said. “This is school and Camp cannot be school!” I think I understood him in the moment - that camp had to be something unique and not borrow heavily on the devices of formal education, namely sitting and listening, not running and doing. Otherwise, I suppose, it could just be an extension of the learning year. Just what every12-year-old craves, right?
What he keenly observed is that kids often learn best by just jumping in, doing, and figuring it out. If you’ve ever tried to explain a new game to a group of campers (a game that was maybe just invented hours before), you know that the questions will follow. “What if….” - insert any number of possibilities in the contemplated question, even if the likelihood of that particular scenario arising is far beyond remote! Sure, the basic rules need to be established and understood, but part of the “game” is learning it - by doing it.
In his recent newsletter, summer camp guru Jack Schott reports back from a conference of international schools he attended in Japan. The upshot of the sessions? Some of the best schools in the world are “trying to cultivate an experience as close to camp as they can.” He reports that many are focused on fostering connection, belonging, and other “soft skills.” Our jobs are certainly different. Their job is to raise SAT scores and grades so as to ensure good college placement. It seems that many may have figured out that scores will rise if they focus more on building good campers.
The idea is not developing in a vacuum. Dartmouth math professor Dan Rockmore writes in The New Yorker about how AI is changing the way his students do math. “If the process is the goal, we should be focussing on how to create classrooms that make the process feel worth doing for its own sake.” At Camp, the process is vastly different from the classroom, but I think the two are linked. If we were somehow (magically) able to give them all the answers about this newly created game, we would deprive the kids of the process of figuring it out themselves. We would deprive them the chance to negotiate, tweak, and even give constructive feedback to the staff overseeing the game. In the end, they gain incredible understanding and it becomes their game. It wasn’t their idea, but they built it. They end up owning it, protecting, and yes, playing it over and over again. This plays out daily when Camp is firing on all cylinders.
I’ve also seen it play out differently. I’ve seen a well-meaning new staff member spend upwards of 20 minutes explaining a game and fielding endless questions, forgetting, in the moment, that they only have 40 minutes of time to work with. When I see it, I think of Hunter’s observation, pull the staff member aside and simply say, “Camp ain’t school, this looks like school. It looks like a great game. Let’s play it and find out.”
Rockmore goes on to state, “The great challenge of teaching is not to transmit information - machines do that cheaply now - but to engineer those moments of genuine understanding reliable enough that students come to crave them.” I think camp engineers these moments of genuine understanding like no one else. The kids sure crave them even if they are not aware that they are also learning something. Maybe that is just the point. I am not sure I could advertise that we are hiring “child-experience engineers” for the summer, not counselors, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it on future resumes of those who did that vital work here. Now to get them to explain it in less than 20 minutes. 😀
