Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

The first day of the leadership camp is done and I’ve already learned a lot as well as come up with several minor and major points I want to discuss with the students as soon as the facilitators go home.

But first, I have a side rant, if it’s not a contradiction to start out with something that’s supposed to be incidental. What’s with the slang of calling themselves by a plural version of the first two syllables of the term for themselves, facilitators? It sounds like fascists, which is what some of them sometimes act like anyway. Talk about negative impact marketing.

The whole morning session was taken up by (a) filling up their nametags (which the students also had to label with the superhero that they thought best described them); (b) of course, a sharing session for explaining the choice of characters; (c) dividing the participants into groups where they had to come up with a group name, a flag and a chant; (d) presentation of said identifiers – these last two seem to be standard in the last three such student meets I’ve gone to; (e) writing down of expectations from themselves, their fellow campers, the facilitators, and the training program; (f) picking out their “little brother/sister” for whom they will act like angels for the rest of the training, sort of like a Secret Santa out of Season.

How would they pull this off? By having each participant label a “mailbox” envelope that were then attached to a wall. They were supposed to send their little charges cryptic inspirational messages that they could put in the mailboxes, or have one of the fascists announce allowed. And since this would not be limited to those who picked each other out (anyone could send a message to anyone using that postal system), it was supposed to make the guessing game a little bit more difficult.

I, for one, cheered up several of the participants by putting something in their mailboxes, and when others saw me, they thought I was just delivering for students who preferred not to approach the public wall and reveal themselves unnecessarily too early.

By the way, the lead facilitator was also from the Ecology Camp we attended last January, whom we have – probably unfairly, but accurately for our own identification purposes – labeled “The Corny One”. For example, one of his favorite teases was he’d give a deadline for a task to the campers, and he’d correct his time unit from minutes to hours if he heard any complaint.

And he was still pulling off those types of gags with us, announcing several times that the camp would last for three weeks.

He also had the habit of calling our meal and snack breaks as the major activities, and everything else we did just as something to pass the time until the major activities.

The first goal for the afternoon session was self-awareness, done by having each student draw another symbolic representation of themselves on the upper part of a piece of paper then passing it around so that others would give their impressions of the person, positive and negative. Unfortunately, this was not comprehensive, but only three per category, and passed an exact number of places to the right or left of their circle of chairs, so they knew who was giving them what comment.

That all the time I have for session number 592. I’ll continue tomorrow. Class dismissed.