Dave and I went to lunch today at a new restaurant here in Charlotte. The line was ridiculously long so we ordered it to go. Thirty-minutes later, we had our food and headed back to my office to eat. It was worth the wait, but that’s not what I want to write about today. Since our lunch took nearly two hours, we had a lot of time to chat about CampLeadership.org and our impression of the new site.
Dave and I are very similar when it comes to our workday. We both do a lot of work in a small period of time, then we have fun and mess around for a greater portion of the day. Personally, I work for an hour or two at a time and then take long breaks. Some might think I am a slacker, but I will get more work done in that one or two hours than most people will get done in a full eight-hour-day. I work very quickly and efficiently, then I like to go online and read TMZ or I take a nap. My work habits are not conducive to a 40-hour 9 to 5 type of job. That’s why I don’t have a 9 to 5 type of job.
This conversation turned to our Web site and we started to think about our readers. Is CampLeadership.org a part of your workday, or is it a part of your break? Are you reading and watching our videos while at work, or do you wait until you get home?
Well, with the new site, we were able to quickly see what times people are visiting CampLeadership.org. We were surprised to learn that a whopping 61-percent of our visitors come to the site after 6 pm. That was pretty shocking to us. Surely, some of this is due to workplace regulations which probably do not allow you to watch YouTube videos, but that can’t be entirely true of everyone.
We then started to wonder if visitors to our site treated us as part of their workday, or part of their break time? Some people have the attitude that when you are at work, you do work. That’s all. Others believe that everything they do at work — even visiting TMZ and Facebook — while on the clock is part of their workday.
We designed CampLeadership.org to be a part of your workday. This is the reason our videos and podcasts are less than 8-minutes-long. We want you to utilize our site while at work — whether it’s right when you get in the office, on your lunch break, or the last thing you do before heading home. Everyone should have an extra 8-minutes each day to take a look at our site when we have updates. If you don’t, then you probably have bigger issues with work habits than we can analyze in one blog post. (We aren’t telling you to NOT visit us at home, but just explaining why we do some of the things we do).
I’m not sure if I always had this attitude about work, but I know that my high school Chemistry teacher had something to do with it. He always told us, “If you study for a test for more than 20-minutes at a time, without a break, you’re doing more damage to your memory than good.” I don’t know what scientific fact he was using to prove this point, but it worked for me. When I was in college, I would do 20-minutes of really hard studying — with absolutely no distractions — and then take a five-minute break for foosball or a quick game of Goldeneye on the N64 and then go back to studying. The times that I actually went back to studying, I retained more information because I gave my brain a break. But that’s the key. If you are going to take these breaks, you need to get back to studying as soon as the timer goes off.
The same goes for work. Having three-hour-long meetings without adequate breaks might do more damage than good. We’ve all been there. Instead of leaving a meeting motivated, you instead feel groggy and emotionally drained.
Everyone has different work habits, and I’m not trying to change yours. I just wanted to offer a little insight to why we do some of the things we do at CampLeadership.org. Dave and I are similar in our work habits, and we tend to think other Camp Directors are like us as well. We need to realize that not everyone is, but that doesn’t mean you can’t fit CampLeadership.org into your day.
This is the first of a several-part series about working with Teenagers. Mike spoke to a former camper of his who has been tasked with starting teen programs at her Y. Their conversation sparked a number of ideas that simply could not fit into one article.
I received a message from a former camper of mine who is now in college and is working at a Y. Her boss had asked her to start teen programming at the Y, and she didn’t know where to start. So, she asked me for advice.
That tells me right there that she will be a pretty good program director. Although she is now leadership staff at the summer camp she attended — the one I worked at — and has dealt with high school students as camp counselors and CITs, she did not feel super confident about starting a program for teenagers at her branch. So, she called someone she knew had the experience — me.
I told her that working with teenagers is a difficult thing. Too many times directors or advisors want to be friends with the teens and this can backfire down the road when you need to show authority. On the other hand, sometimes people come on too strong with the power trip and demand too much respect from the get-go. When it comes time for a teen to open up about their life, they won’t because they are too afraid of the repercussions. I told her there is a small window I call “The Fine Line of Working With Teens” that you have to walk that straddles between being their buddy and being their Mom or Dad.
What was great about this conversation was that I could point to things I had done almost ten years ago that walked this fine line. I asked her if she remembered a prank that my teen boys had pulled on the teen girls while she was one of those teen girls. She did, as it was very memorable to most who were involved.
Apparently, before I ever worked at this camp, pranks were a common occurrence. But these pranks usually involved damage to camp property, hurt feelings, lost sleep and the reprimanding of the counselor who allowed it. When I came to the camp, the director had installed a strict no pranks policy for that year. My cabin of teens — about 25 of them — were very upset because they had waited a very long time to pull some of the classic pranks that were pulled on them like “shutter bangs” and “sock ambushes” — which had in the past caused broken shutters and broken noses.
My teen campers thought I was no fun because I actually listened to our camp director and wouldn’t allow them to pull any pranks. I did however challenge them by telling them to come up with a prank that does not break any rules, or does not hurt anyone — physically or emotionally. If they did that, we would pull the prank.
They responded by saying it was impossible. They said that a prank that falls within camp rules wouldn’t be funny or fun to pull off. But, a few of them decided to take on the challenge.
Several hours later they proposed an idea that truly was genius. They wanted to transport sand from the lake’s waterfront to the porch of the teen girl cabin — several hundred yards away — in order to make a beach. Once we had enough sand we would set up a badminton court, lie out towels, put tiki torches out, and build sand castles. We figured that it would confuse everyone at camp, but not upset anyone.
It was impressive, and it didn’t break any rules. We woke up early — instead of sneaking out after curfew — and worked for several hours on the project in the dark. We headed back to our cabin and got ready for morning assembly — which was right next to the girls’ new porch beach. When we arrived, the entire cabin of girls were enjoying the beach we had made for them — they didn’t know it was us at the time — by laying out on the towels we provided, playing badminton and building sand castles. Most of the camp had surrounded the porch and was amazed to see what someone had done. They were in awe. No one knew who had done it, and no one knew how it was done.
At breakfast I was called into the camp director’s office. He asked me, “Was it your cabin that pulled this prank?”
I said yes. He reminded me about his no prank policy and I cut him off mid-sentence.
I said, “If you can tell me one rule that we broke, then we will accept any punishment you give me and my guys. But, I’m pretty sure we didn’t break any rules.”
He told me to leave the office and asked me to meet him “on the beach” in 30-minutes. When I met him, he said the following statement that will always stick with me, “This is amazing. Make sure you clean it up by lunchtime.”
We cleaned it up, but it is still etched into the mind of anyone who saw it. More importantly, it taught my teens a very valuable lesson. You can still have fun without breaking the rules. You just need to get creative.
The same goes for working with teens and with camp staff. Don’t try to be their friend, but don’t try to be their parent. There is a very fine-line that you need to walk.
More of “The Fine Line of Working With Teens” in the coming days and weeks.
The original goal of CampLeadership.org was to provide a place for camp directors and counselors to come and watch videos of new games and songs. Our original Web site design managed this perfectly. We posted videos of counselors singing songs and teaching games.
Pretty soon we were getting a lot of page views, but they were still mostly from people that we personally knew; people who we had always shared resources with. We told them to check it out, and they did. Then they started to share it. The word of mouth grew, especially once camp directors who were on Twitter got word of it.
We started to add more and more content — not just games and songs — now we were showing videos of workshops we attended with amazing camp experts presenting some incredible information. Then we decided to start writing stuff ourselves. This then lead to Podcasts. The site grew and grew, and more and more people were using it.
As of this writing, we had uploaded 99 videos to the original site. We had a few dozen Podcasts, and about 50 articles. The software we were using could not manage the page numbers we grew to. Plus, we had done some things a little backwards from the beginning, according to Google Search Engine Optimization standards. We never cared too much about this originally because no one was searching for us, because no one knew to search for a site like this. Well, that has now changed.
Not only do we think the site redesign looks incredible, but the functionality of it works so much better. You can actually search for specific games and songs, and each video is now tagged with the appropriate description. Looking for just icebreakers? Just search for icebreakers. Only want “repeat-after-me” songs? No problem.
The site is not finished — it never will be — but we are continually adding new and old stuff to it every day. The one thing that is missing are the written articles. We will be adding new written posts to this new site, but we will not be transferring our archived posts from the old site. But, the good news is that we are currently working with a publisher to create our first book, The 12 Months of Summer Camp. Not only will you be able to purchase a hard copy of the book, but it will also be available on Kindles and iPads. More information about the book will announced in the next few weeks, along with some announcements of new partnerships.
We are so excited about the new CampLeadership.org site, and we have some seriously exciting things to announce in just the next few weeks. We hope you are all using the site on a regular basis, and are sharing it with coworkers and friends. Thanks so much for your support.
While watching the Modern Family episode “Strangers on a Treadmill,” I found some parallels to being a Camp Director.
The episode is a spoof of the Alfred Hitchcock movie Strangers on a Train, where two men agree to murder someone in their respective lives as a favor to the other. Both the film and episode deal with having to hurt someone they love — or loved at one time. It’s easier to tell a stranger that they aren’t funny (or murder them), but it’s hard to tell your husband he isn’t (this has never been hard for my wife, who is the only person I know who says I’m not funny).
The concept itself can lead to parallels in the camp world dealing with the termination of staff, but that’s for another time. My connection to this episode deals with a Camp Director’s fear of failure.
Claire wants her husband to do away with his lame jokes during a scheduled presentation he is going to make to area realtors. When she can’t break the news to Phil, and neither can her brother, she steals all her husband’s note cards. Phil goes on without them, and winds up making the entire audience crack up with his improvisation.
After the presentation, Claire tells Phil that he was amazing (he was) and Phil admits that he knew she stole his index cards.
Then Claire says this: “Sometimes I think my job is to make sure you guys don’t fall on your faces.”
Phil responds with, “That’s a hard job at the Dunphy house. But maybe your job is to pick us back up when we fall. You’re good at that.”
That conversation hit me like a brick wall. It is a perfect metaphor for being a Camp Director. What type of Director are you? One who constantly worries about accidents and the failure of your staff, or one who is able to pick up the pieces when things fall apart?
They are two very different jobs, and they say a lot about a Director’s personality. Think about it. Are you the type of person who worries more about the issue itself, or having to deal with the issue?
Personally, I worried a lot about accidents at camp. I lost sleep thinking about what may be happening to staff and campers when I was not around. But, whenever something horrible happened — whether it was an e-coli outbreak, lice, broken arms, 911 calls, the Norwalk virus (all things that happened) — I was always the calmest person around. I was cool and collected. I was able to pick people back up when they fell. I was able to notify parents and was able to calm them down because I was calm myself.
I worried all the time about failure at camp, but I was very good at turning the situation around.
So what type of Camp Director are you? Are you prepared enough to avoid every issue that comes up during a summer of camp? Well, that’s impossible. You can’t prepare for everything.
Since you cannot prepare for everything life throws at you, are you able to handle issues when they occur? If you’re not, you might need to hire a Claire Dunphy — someone who can help pick you and your staff back up when you fall. Your camp will be much better for it, and you will be able to sleep a little easier.
