How being a camp counselor prepared me for classroom teaching

Starting when I was 15, I was a camp counselor for five consecutive summers. I realized it taught me a lot about being a teacher! Here are a few reasons why:

1.      1.   That threshold of embarrassment was crossed really quickly.

When working with children, you learn to get over any embarrassment at doing something you wouldn’t normally do in front of adults. At summer camp, that comes even quicker. It seems like you are parading from one hilarious thing to the other, and you must be their fearless leader in all of it. For example, as you can see in the picture below, one night in the cabin, the girls and I decided it would be a good idea to pull our shirts over our heads and draw mustaches on ourselves while dancing to Jason Derulo.

                                                            It was a good look for me, right?

I promise you, I would never do this in front of adults. I’m way too self-conscious. But working at a summer camp just relieved me of any self-consciousness in front of kids pretty quickly.

Behold. This me and another camp counselor running around in sheet-capes pretending to be superheroes. 

There's no shame in my game.

2.       2. You get firsthand exposure to helicopter parents.

So you might have parents who don’t really get it that the point of a drop-off is, in fact, to drop off their child in the cabin so that camp can finally start. Instead, they might hang around for a couple of hours quizzing you on pretty much useless information.

I also had a parent call and give me a series of medical questions because his daughter tripped and scraped her knee.

This is all to say that it was at least good preparation for being a schoolteacher.

3.       3.  Summer camp gives you experience working with children in such a different environment than with a school.

I’m grateful my first real block of time working with children happened at camp. It’s incredibly fun to be out there in nature and to be experiencing one cool thing to the next. Now working in a classroom, I occasionally will look back wistfully on the days we trampled down trails to get to our destinations, and our goals for the day were more like crafts and swimming than adding two-digit numbers.

That’s not to say I don’t enjoy classroom teaching. I bring with me the experience and the memories of summer camp, and even some songs. (Every year, I teach my students “Little Cabin in the Woods” as a brain break, and they love it!)

Any other summer-camp-counselors-turned-teachers out there?