setup week

I've realized again, and I think I've noticed this before, that one of my favorite things about the summer at Flying Moose is setting up camp. There's something very satisfying about unpacking, organizing, and assembling the hardware of camp, and of getting the new counselors into (and returning counselors back into) the "flow" of camp life through the setup process.

I've noticed this because I'm starting to feel a bit sad, or tired maybe, now that things are almost all put together. The tents are up, filled with cots, shelves, trash can, broom, and counselor. The docks are in. The canoes are patched and on the racks. The counselors are into the routine of meals and wake up and rest hour and Brown Study. The Brown Study is up to speed and should be able to handle shitloads of camper poop (yesterday I replaced a bit of pipe running to the urinal that had developed a leak). And I just finished helping the packshack guy put together the first session's case lots order (there was way too much food left over from last year! so we'll need to do some clever meal planning to equalize it all this summer -- an example of a challenge I find interesting).

I guess I'm ready for a change. And this is fortuitous because the campers arrive on Thursday, and then it's all new again. New problems (er, challenges) to face. New personalities to figure out and integrate into camp life. New opportunities for growth.

And so it goes, year after year. Some of the guys rebuilt the float this year, and it is currently being assembled in the water. Naturally, whenever non-professionals do this sort of thing, there are errors (I definitely include myself in this), so the assembly is taking a bit longer as they make the adjustments needed because it's not fitting together the way they envisioned. There are two things that I feel are most important in education: designing and improvising. Ideally, one gets good enough at the former to avoid having to do much of the latter, but the latter is pretty important to know when the former fails.

I haven't put the two together before, so I'm wondering how universal they are to different subjects. For example, there's design in the creation of term paper, but actually creating it is an act of improvisation (but it's one that you can go back and edit, so maybe "improvisation" isn't the best word. Maybe it's more a matter of theory and practice, which are already stalwart terms bandied about in education. But they are terms that seem too vague to me, or maybe because they are so foundational, they get taken for granted and not really understood as broadly/diversely as they might be.

At any rate, the summer moves on. "Session Zero: the counselors" is about finished, and "Session 1: the campers" is about to start. Then "Session 2: more campers" begins in a short 3 1/2 weeks, and by then I'm really tired. Ah! Summer at FML!