What I Learned About Endurance While Teaching at a Summer Camp
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice rising in irritation.
“It’s not a hard question,” I said, trying to put on a mask of patience while my mind emitted a silent scream. “Try.”
“But I don’t know what you mean,” she cried, enunciating each word as if it were me and not she who was having trouble understanding.
And that was the recurring story of my days teaching English at a summer camp to a bunch of European kids.
Hard though it was, the camp surely was one of the most transformative experiences in my life. Having never been close to children (in all senses of the term) I was initially terrified of what this would entail. Their boundless energy, unending questions, mood swings… and these were the aspects I knew of. Were there others, more insidious, that parents were keeping away from the world, that would spring on me like thieves in a dark alley?
Yeah, turned out, there were.
But not all of them were bad.
Here are the lessons I took back home with me.
Even the most stubborn have ONE soft spot
8-year old Rob wouldn’t speak to me. He just wouldn’t. We had to do an assignment together — I had to help him make a chart of something he was passionate about to present to an audience — and he wouldn’t succumb to my increasingly desperate entreaties.
I noticed that his eyes wandered outside the windows often. I followed his gaze one time. His best pal Jacob was playing outside. How does Jakob not have the same assignment? I wondered, making a mental note to inform the camp supervisor about Jacob’s lazy mentor, then trained my eyes back to Jamie who was looking at me hopefully.
“Do you want to play?” I asked him.
He nodded vigorously.
So we did our assignment over games. I threw a ball to him, and each time he dropped it, he named something he loved. He loved musicals, I learned eventually. And when I asked more questions, he opened up so much, he wouldn’t stop talking. Or singing.
The presentation went very well. There were no charts. There were a lot of songs.
Everybody only ever wants to be understood
14-year old Esmeralda dreamed of being an artist. But mostly, she dreamed of leaving home.
She told me her mother didn't really understand her. That she was a mistake child. That she was what had kept her parents together over the years because they fought all the time otherwise. Esmeralda had body image issues, was anorexic, and had self-harmed in the past.
She was thin as rails. She wore oversized shirts, painted her nails black, sported safety pins for earrings. She dressed to blend in the stand-out crowd.
She exhibited the symptoms of John Bowlby’s ‘anxious-preoccupied-attachment’: the need to constantly seek approval, high level of emotional expressiveness, impulsiveness in relationships, a low image of self.
I told her about my love-annoy relationship with my mother, how my volatile childhood triggered my writing, how I grew up full of angst but later learnt to channelize it better.
Her eyes popped. “Really?” she said. “Do you think one day she might understand me better?”
Most definitely, I told her.
When we hugged goodbye, she didn’t want to let me go.
People have more in common than they think
13-year old Diana was shy as a turtle. Her furtive eyes scanned her older female roommates and she bit her lips. “I wish I could be more social,” she said. I know she wanted to add, like them.
I didn’t know what to tell her. I uttered some tripe: “You may feel this way now. But being a nerd is a good thing. Standing out is a good thing. The girls you envy today, are not going to be doing so well ten years from now. You’re going to be doing better because you have A’s on all your subjects and you’ll invent something, and make shitloads of money.”
“You don’t know that,” she said, her face a mix of defiance and hope.
“Yes, I do,” I told her, sounding more confident than I felt. How could I tell her I wondered that myself every day?
We are changing and growing every day, or at least, we can
16-year old Celine was a prima donna. Away from her parents, she had gone all out. She had brought with her a boxload of makeup and applied them liberally on her translucent skin. Her dresses clung to her blossoming body and her false eyelashes fluttered all the time. She twirled her long flaxen hair provocatively as she talked to me.
I was practice.
She agreed with everything I said. As I prodded her to tell me her career goals, an archaeologist, a palaeontologist, an astronomer, a surgeon, the answers came pat. I realized I shouldn’t finish her sentences for her.
When I had some time to think about it later, I realize what the right word to describe her was: Beguiling. But different that she was, she brought a unique flavour to the group; a ‘young adult’ navigating her way through a new world.
I remember being like her once; a passing phase. Several years later, I’m different, but am still here.
‘Doing without thinking’ can sometimes be a good thing
This attitude struck me again and again as I interacted with the kids. Action and consequences had not cemented in their young brains yet, and so they said YES more often than not. They raised their hands even if they did not know how to play a game, they said YES to taking part in an improv session (while I cowered), they said yes to talking to new people even if they didn’t look or talk like them. Like they did with me.
Children. They are quick to raise their hands.
And lastly, tough times DO end. And brings along its sweet rewards
I somewhat get it now when parents tell me there’s nothing more simultaneously punishing and rewarding than raising children. During the days of the camp I must have sighed and shrugged in frustration more times than I have in my entire lifetime, but every time a child flashed me a trusting smile, grasped my hand out of the blue as we walked, or chose me to join his team in a game, I felt like it was all worth it.
If you liked what you read, please “clap” to show me some love. Also, head over to www.smitabhattacharya.com to read about my other adventures. I travel a lot and always have something weird to say.
