Hello! Happy New Year! 2020 is up and so far Australia is on fire and we lasted 6 days without a new war!
Kind of feel like it is pretty much in line with my expectations though.
English Camps…
TL:DR Don’t forget to manage your workloads. Be pragmatic and think everything through. Be prepared with alternative plans.
Did any of you try to make a little extra yen on the side over the winter holidays by joining an English camp? I did! It was pretty good all things considered. The level of the students’ was pretty incredible in the high school camp I joined. They used mostly English to discuss and debate at a level I’ve not seen before, and this is my third time at this particular camp. It’s very popular though with over 320 students applying to join and only 71 allowed to attend. (I don’t know why it was 71 and not a nice clean round number… that annoyed me, lol.)
But, and there’s always a but… probably because I’m not very tactful and a bit of an arse, there was quite a large bit of room for improvement.
What causes bad camps
Looking back at the camps I’ve joined the best ones are always the most prepared. Duh, right? But I suppose it’s not super easy to prepare 3-5 days worth of materials for dozens of students, explain those materials to the ALTs and staff working, make sure all the materials are prepped, and then maintain the schedule.
And for those of you who have joined a poorly executed camp, it probably felt like the entire thing was an afterthought scrapped together like Mary Shelley’s monster. There is a reason for that though, and it’s not always your camp leader and company’s fault. It is often largely out of their control. The culprit here is often the BOE. I have led only one camp myself and the BOE didn’t tell us we had the contract officially until 14 days before the camp. Approval of the financials didn’t get finalized until a week before. They must think that after a camp is decided a trained elite English teaching force is released to quickly and efficiently manufacture a finished product working around the clock. This is not the case. Your camp will probably be created by 1-2 people. My camp went very well, but that’s because I’m OCD, pragmatic, and apparently I work fast. And my support staff, (one reliable hard working lady), printed everything I made and organized it well.
Advice No. 1, take care of your crew
My first advice to anyone leading a camp for the first time is to coddle your teachers that are working under you. Don’t overload them with all the minutiae, tell them what they need to know, what they need to do, and make it simple. The more teachers you have the simpler you have to make it. But possibly, and more importantly, don’t overwork them. This is especially important for overnight camps. The first overnight camp I attended we worked 14-17 hours per day. The pay was roughly 14,000 per day. For me, this was unacceptable. If I am going to ask people to do a week’s worth of work in 3 days then they’d have to get paid more than the BOE and the company are willing to part with, so, as the leader it’s on you to manage the workload to be fair and efficient. Most new camp leaders are zeroed in on the student experience and panicking because they have so little time to do so much that they don’t even realize that they are essentially the boss.
Give the teachers breaks. Are the students taking a practice test? You don’t need all your teachers to administer the test, let them have an hour off. Are the student’s making a presentation? Tell the teachers to at some point take a 15 minute breather during that time (important point for this is to make sure they don’t all do it at the same time, you can’t leave the students unattended). After dinner? Your teachers are finished! Done-zo! Fini! But it’s an overnight camp… they have to stay on the premises… what are they going to do? They’re gonna probably hangout with their kids, playing games and stuff, helping them finish their speeches or presentations, just talking. It’s important to encourage your teachers to do those things in their free time, BUT emphasize that it’s totally up to them, just the fact that it is optional takes such a load off. Your teachers will happily still be working… but you’ve done it in a way that makes it more relaxed and they won’t tear you apart when they write their reviews afterwards.
Hallmarks of good camp leader
Over the camps I’ve attended the best camp leaders (MC) are the ones who are one of two things, sometimes both.
A. They are showman (or show-women, but now that I think about it I’ve never had a camp MC who was female, which seems to point to a larger social issue). They can engage, they bask in being the center of attention.
B. They are masters of the pithy speech. They don’t use ten words when three will suffice. They don’t start and stop sentences. They don’t go off on tangents. They explain stuff to both students and teachers with precision.
I am not A. I am B. I am fairly strong at public speaking, but I think it is easier for A type to learn to incorporate B type than vise versa. But I think it is important to recognize what you are and are not capable of, don’t be afraid to play to your personal strengths and capitalize on the abilities of others.
Doors and Corners
A perfect camp, I’ve never seen, but my last bit of advice I’d like to Expand on is, “Doors and corners, kid. That’s where they get you.” (If you get this reference you rock beratna/sésata).
Lay out your schedule. Take note of the pacing, breaks, linked activities, solo activities. Then make each activity. As with your normal lesson planning think it all through thoroughly. Just because you’ve used it in lessons in your school successfully doesn’t mean your teachers will understand how to implement it or the kids will understand how to do it. Think back to when you first started. Identify fail points, choke points, and alternative methods. How many students are there. If it’s more than a standard class size how will you need to adjust? Just think critically for goodness sake. We had one communication where students roll dice to determine what questions they would ask, divided like this: 1-4 pick from question pool A, 5-8 pool B, and 9-12 pool C. And they gave us two 6-sided die. You see the issue right? It’s impossible to roll a 1. This wasn’t a huge issue, but my kids noticed it on their own.
Little mistakes like that slipped through and of course that precipitated much larger issues arising due to not being pragmatic when coming up with activities. First ask, “Can I do this?” Then ask, “If I was stupid, could I still do this?” Parts of the camp were literally impossible to do because they didn’t think things through. When that happens you have a critical failure across all teachers and groups, and then all teachers will individually come up with their own separate solutions to fix the problem or they will stop and just be stuck. So then every single group could potentially have done different things or nothing at all. The variables expand exponentially then. Doors and corners kid…
P.S. All materials should be converted to PDF form. There were printing errors due to some materials being made in powerpoint or something, which honestly made no gorram sense…
P.P.S. Don’t get cute and try to rename stuff. Maybe you think ALTs should be called Assistant Speech Supporters. You think all ALTs in Japan should be reclassified as ASSes. So now you’re lead of a camp and you insist on using your new personal acronym. Well you’re gonna confuse everyone that isn’t you. Your actual ALTs, your staff, your students… It adds one more pointless variable. Call your ALTs either teachers or ALTs.
P.P.P.S. I was tasked with making 2 large activities for this camp, one of them I’ve done in the past, the other I created for the first time. Because the particulars of the new activity were set by others, I had to work within a framework and it was a fairly complicated activity. To explain the activity to both teachers and students. I made an animated PowerPoint presentation. It worked splendidly. I would highly recommend it. That time I invested paid out dividends when it came time to try the activity. Just one word of warning. Another ALT at this camp saw my PowerPoint video, decided to also use PowerPoint, but when it came time for him to do it, they didn’t have the computer and projector set up properly. So that ate up a lot of time getting it to work. That was the fault of the support staff to a degree, but he should’ve been aware that technical difficulties are always a real and present danger. When it came time for me to use the computer and projector I told the staff to have things ready before I started. Doors and corners, eh.
In transparency, this event actually had a very bad error. Of the 14 locations, one of the hint cards given to the students was duplicated onto the wrong key. So one of the locations had no hints and one of the locations had 2 hints. But, it didn’t ruin the event… why? I planned some redundancy into the event with each group’s ALT carrying a master list of all the hints, keys, locations, and codes. So each group, as they encountered the problem was able to sidestep it. Phew… Experience teaches you to be ready for things to go wrong.
My events weren’t perfect. One large issue happened during this amazing race activity. However, I had built in redundancy that let each group’s ALT identify problems and solve them on their own.
ALT(er)native Teaching 