"In Christ's name, we play"

I'm taking a few of my students to summer camp in July.  Yes, I'm voluntarily choosing to spend six out of about thirty free summer days with my students. Currently three are on board for a full or partial scholarship, and I'm working on a fourth. This isn't an academic camp. It is a messy, sweaty, paint-covered, oar-rowing, rope-swinging, lunch song singing, fire-building, prayerful, mosquito-bitten camp. That's exactly where I want to take four of my creative, outgoing students who are generally under appreciated by their peers. I've spent all year insisting that they stay on topic and sit quietly in their seats unless I call on them or give them permission to stand. Now I want to see them smear food on each others' faces and march on tables. I want to see them rolling around in a mud pit playing tug-of-war. I really want to see them dancing and being as loud and WEIRD as their hearts desire. I want to see them talking to other kids who also speculate whether the skunk ape is really real.

My camp students are so excited. Pretty much daily all of them will ask me a question about camp or just exclaim knowingly, "I'm so excited about this summer!" They are excited by the prospect of staying in real camp cabins with bunk beds "like in the movies." They are especially interested in and excited about the ropes course. They open their eyes widely when I tell them that, no, they won't be able to use a phone or mp3 player for six days. The respite from technology is a sacrifice they will share with other campers.

Camp Bratton-Green is a place very dear to my husband's heart and, more recently, to mine. Lloyd has attended the camp since he was a third grader and has worked there since high school, spending two college summers on the Permanent Staff as the head of Nature programming. I went there on several middle school retreats and still remember dancing to "Leaving on a Jet Plane" in the rec hall with my sixth-grade crush at a school dance. Eleven years later I mailed weekly or bi-weekly letters to Lloyd there as he worked on the Permanent Staff. A year after that Lloyd asked me to marry him there during a talent show while we were staffing a high school winter session. Seven months after that we got married there in a chapel that shares grounds and ties with the camp. Lloyd cites Camp Bratton-Green as his favorite place on earth.

Staring contests, catching carpenter ants for ant fondue, sixth grade boys dressing in drag, eating ice cream off the table with no hands or utensils, night hikes with people dressed up as monsters and jumping out at kids, lunchtime speed singing competitions--these are all things I want my kids to see and participate in. They need to. Their lives depend on it. I must do this for their future.

Here are some engagement shot glimpses of camp (in a much more serene state than when campers are present):

CHANGE -- YES WE CAN

What will I change next year? It seems like every day I think of a way I could be just a bit better at what I do. The challenge is finding the time, energy, and most efficient method to do so. 

Discipline can be a big headache for me to consider, the thing that really gets me down. I spend many planning period hours troubleshooting or venting about discipline. While my classroom is under better control for the most part than it was last semester, there is still much to be desired. I plan on using much of the same system I use now but just being able to enforce consequences more effectively, firmly, and with greater confidence from the very start and through the long fall stretch. This plan may sound ambiguous, and it's perhaps a bit unlikely that I'll just suddenly be a more effective disciplinarian. However, I do think that starting out at the beginning of the year used to the sheer NOISE of sixth graders--all their grunts and complaints and crazed paranoia that every person around them is out to get them--will make me more capable to actually anticipate and deal swiftly with their issues. They are quite a needy group. How many times in a day do I hear "Can you tell him to stop looking at me?" "Can you tell him to stop tapping his foot?" "Can you tell her to stop blowing her nose?" I live in a world of "can you tell her" and "can you tell him" squealing eruptions, and it has changed the rhythm of my heart. Seriously. Medically. Emotionally. I hope that some day the rhythm of my heart corrects itself, but I don't  count on it happening in the next year. 

Key student behaviors to absolutely positively shoot down from the beginning include: talking back when getting a consequence, commenting on other students' consequences, calling out a response for another student who is taking too long to answer, ATTITUDE. Those are a few that immediately come to mind. 

I didn't start this post wanting to talk about discipline, however. Two paragraphs ago I planned to say, "Discipline can be a big headache for me to consider, and I hate it. But when I think of ideas for planning a rigorous, stream-lined, structured, meaningful curriculum for next year, I get excited. Discipline sucks energy from my soul. Imagining students workshopping their writing replenishes." That's how the discipline conversation works, though. Once it starts, it's hard to kill the beast. What I really want to change, what makes me glow and skip is imagining being able to implement a weekly routine next year. 

Monday: Focused freewrite. We preview and read an excellent passage together and discuss it for about 10 minutes before they do a focused freewrite on a specific topic from the passage. We've done this this semester with "Hair," "Where I Buy Candy," "Bullying," and "Sunday Mornings," just to name a few. Most of the students love it and actually write non-stop with little break for a solid 10 minutes. 

Tuesday: Grammar and Mechanics Lesson. We'll do guided notes, guided, and independent practice. Pretty standard stuff. End with an MCT2 practice question on the topic we're covering.

Wednesday: Differentiated instruction day. Most of the time this will manifest as pair work based on Tuesday's lesson. I do really want to try out a class blog, however, where students can post assignment responses and read and respond on each others' work. I envision this happening on Wednesdays. 

Thursday: Workshop of Monday's writing. We'll apply whatever grammar or mechanics concepts we learned that week to the freewrite they did on Monday. 

Friday: Glorious assessments day. Show me what 'ya got. Hallelujah. This is school-wide. 

I've started implementing this schedule somewhat this semester, and I'm starting to get in a real groove. I love being able to have a template for my week and not feeling like I'm starting from scratch with a new plan every week. I think the students like it, too.