Boy Scout Day Camp
No no.. I like laying here on the floor. Really, I do. Just leave me here, please.
So Zack has Cub Scout Day Camp this week. It takes place at one of the local parks, and runs from 9:00 am until 3:00 pm. There are something like 200 boys in attendance, and the schedule includes games, crafts, fishing, archery, bb-guns and nature studies. Pretty cool, in theory.
In practice, though, maybe not so much. At the end of the day, I'd give it a D+, maybe a C-. Of course, I didn't go into this with the best attitude either, as I was grouchy that parents were ordered to pick a day and come walk with the kids. It's always billed the same way. "Oh, you won't have to do anything, really. There are instructors at each station that will handle all of the actual activities. You're just there to be a bathroom runner and to keep the groups moving. Easiest thing in the world."... Except that that's never really true, and today turned out to be anything but 'easy'.
For example, the first place the kids were assigned to go was to the BB-shooting range. We got there on time, no instructor to be seen. The boys dutifully lined up at the edge of the field and waited (pretty darned patiently, I thought) for the leader to show up. She finally did, and they all listened eagerly to her instructions.
But right from the start, it was a fiasco. For one thing, the leader was worthless. We have eight boys in our group ranging in age from six to eight, and none of them have ever so much as laid eyes on a BB gun before, much less ever shot one, much less ever misbehaved at a rifle range. But from the way the woman who arrived to instruct acted, you'd think she was dealing with a pack of hardened criminals who had already been on her range for an hour shooting the guns off at everything that moved. The first thing she did once she got everyone's attention was to rattle off a list of rules and threats of consequences should the boys break a rule. I.e. -- "If you yell fire while standing outside the range, I will pull your belt loop."
All the boys looked at each other in confusion. They had no idea what this meant. It hadn't occurred to anyone to yell 'fire'. Why would they yell 'fire'? Were they supposed to yell 'fire' at some point? Maybe they were only to yell 'fire' from inside the range? Or what? And what did she mean by 'pull their belt loop'? None of them had a Bb-shooting beltloop. How could she pull something they didn't have?
Timmy S, who is one of those kids who strongly believes it is his calling to ask the important questions and convey important information just in case the adult in question might simply not have all the facts, says, "But...but we don't HAVE belt loops." I know Timmy; he's not trying to be a smart aleck; in his mind, he's confused and wants clarification. The instructor, though, thought he was being fresh and glared at him until he shrank back and looked to Kathy (his mother) for reassurance. It happened fast, so I don't even know if Kathy noticed, but I did.
At any rate, no one questioned Militant BB Woman. The boys are pretty good boys, all told. Besides, safety on any gun range is important, and I didn't blame her for being strict about behavior on the course. I blamed her for instructing incredibly badly.
Once she had barked out her confusing rules, THEN she went into a fast and spotty explanation as to what the boys would be doing that utterly failed to take into account the lack of experience of all of the boys. She threw around terms none of them had ever heard before, and didn't explain what she meant. She "One of you will be the shooter, one of you will be the loader. The ground is muddy today, so we won't be doing the lying-down position. (The boys looked at each other in confusion again. Lying down position?) Instead you will be doing a kneeling shoot. (Kneeling shoot? Uh..okay.)" She did have a kid there -- probably her son -- who was trying to demonstrate, but she was going fast and he was having a hard time keeping up. Then she realized she'd completely forgotten to explain the safety and had to go back to explain how to take the safety on and off, which confused the boys even more.
Then she paired the boys up and sent them onto the range. At no point did she explain to them that the kids who were shooters would shoot three times, and then the loaders and shooters would switch, so the boys were confused there too. I think Zack, who was a Loader, was under the impression that he just wasn't going to be allowed to shoot. Timmy S. and Alex thought they were supposed to switch off each round, so they did. Militant BB Lady caught them doing this, and stopped everything to yell right in Timmy's face about it.
"WHO told you to switch? Did *I* tell you to switch? I'm talking to YOU, sir. Who told you to switch? He did? Is HE in charge of this range, sir? Are YOU in charge of this range, sir? No. *I* am in charge, You do what *I* tell you to do."
Yeah, sure lady.. except that you didn't tell them! You just sent them out there and yelled, "Fire!". Oh, and apparently SHE is the only one who gets to yell 'Fire'. At least we got THAT sorted out.
The point is, this angry barrage left both Alex and Timmy in tears. They hadn't meant to do anything wrong, hadn't known they were DOING anything wrong. They had made an erroneous assumption, but it was innocently made and hadn't put anyone in any danger.
Kathy was all but twitching with anxiety. She's was watching this enormous bully pick on her son, and was powerless to do anything about it. After all, we're instilling a respect for authority here, and it wouldn't be right to undermine her in front of our boys and the boys from other packs who were waiting to shoot. But holy moly, lady... You're TEACHING LITTLE KIDS HOW TO SHOOT GUNS. That probably isn't wise in the first place, but if you insist upon doing so, YOU HAVE TO DO IT RIGHT. That means you sit them down, you assume they know nothing. You show them the gun, the bullets, the target. You show them the trigger, the safety, the cocking mechanism and explain what they do. You get TWO KIDS to help you demonstrate the Loader/Shooter routine. You explain the importance of safety, stressing that no one should speak on the range aside from the instructor. And you tell the kids what to expect when they actually step onto that range, including who will shoot and when.
And THEN...if they screw up.. THEN you yell at them. And if they're screwing around being little twerps, BY ALL MEANS, make 'em cry. Get it through to them that horseplay on a shooting range is absolutely not to be tolerated under any circumstances. I am RIGHT WITH YOU there. But damn it, do NOT set them up to fail by instructing badly and then yelling at them when they don't understand.
Kathy was ready to cry. I was mad. We quietly railled against the unfairness of it all, and then reacted with predictable dismay when our kids were dismissed from their shooting with 40 minutes left to the hour designated for the shooting. 40 minutes?!
That, we agreed, was rather unacceptable. But it was like that for most of the day. Each activity station was alotted 1 full hour of time, whether they needed it or not.. so if shooting took 20 minutes (and really, the INSTRUCTION alone should have lasted that long) and we were left to entertain eight riled-up boys for that long until we took them on to sports. At that station they had two smallish fields marked out. They divided our group (which was comprised of four different dens) into two groups of 30 boys, and put one on one course playing some kind of frisbee game, and the other on the other course playing soccer.
Picture this for yourself, now. We're not talking about a regulation field here. Just a narrow strip of grass alongside the park road. 30 boys playing soccer with one ball. Try to predict how many injuries, fights and general complaints resulted from THAT scenario. Yikes. Then mentally border that scenario on one side with a strip of wilderness fringed with rampant poison ivy. Getting a good mental picture there? 30 boys. Running. Kicking ONE ball. Poison Ivy.
Fail.
From there we went on to Games, and that was somewhat better. It was structured, the leader was engaged in actually leading the games, and the boys seemed to enjoy it. Even better: it lasted for most of the hour. ;)
Then came lunch. Yay, lunch!
After lunch was easier. We had crafts and then nature. The boys were exhausted, so we were glad to have quieter activities in the afternoon.
We arrived at the Crafts station and discovered with dismay that the powers that be had seen fit to provide the craft instructor with a whopping TWO TABLES at which to sit sixty-odd kids. This meant that only about 20 kids could work on their crafts at a time, and that the other 40 or so had to occupy themselves somehow while waiting for their turn. Two preteen boys had been enlisted to 'lead a game', but come on... 12 year old boys? What sort of game did the leader think they were going to lead successfully? They led some kind of running-around game, and then tried to get the boys to sit down on the lake bank and play a game of 'I Spy'. Our kids were bored, but they were reasonably going along with it. Some kid stood up and said he spied something 'brown', and some boys from another den started guessing variants of 'poop' and finding themselves hilarious for doing so. I went into Camp Wyman Counselor mode, marched over and plunked my big butt down between them. "Hello, boys. That'll be enough of THAT now."
They shut up. And good for them, because I was hot, tired, and irritable. Not a recipe for Patient, Tolerant Wix, let me tell you. Blood might have been shed otherwise, and I think they sort of knew it.
Meh.
With Camp Wyman mode activated, I took charge from then on out. I rounded up our boys, walked them to approximately where Nature was supposed to meet, and sat them all down. "All right. We're going to solve a Mini Mystery." I said, and launched them into the one about John and Mary lying dead on the floor, surrounded by glass and water. I figured if it worked to keep United Way Inner City kids quiet and thinking, it would probably work on eight little suburban boys too.
And I was right. Once they got the idea that they needed to ask questions to learn more before they guessed the answer, they really got into it. And suddenly I was fielding questions from kids I'd never seen before. I looked up and realized the entire group of sixty boys was sitting at my feet, all of them anxious to find out about poor John and Mary and solve the mystery of their senseless deaths.
Kathy started to figure it out at some point and asked the right leading questions, and when they figured out that John and Mary were fish, it was like this huge triumph. It was awesome.
I realized how much I loved being the Nature Instructor at Wyman, and how much I still miss working there.
Anyway, we did survive it, and both Kathy and I agreed that we are VERY GLAD we are not walking with the boys tomorrow. We also plan to put the boys to bed EARLY tonight, because it was clear they were tired today.
Do any of you know any good Mini Mysteries, BTW? Let me be clear on what I want here, though, because apparently there are two different definitions in play currently, and most of the 'Mini Mysteries' I find online are not what I'm after.
So, to be clear: When I think of a Mini Mystery, I think of a very brief scenario (usually only a few sentences) that describes a crime and gives clues as to what happened. These clues are usually somewhat cleverly misleading. The point is to sort out who dunnit/how, etc. by asking yes/no questions of the teller. The teller can only answer yes, no, or 'not relevant'.
When I do a search online, I get a lot of Encyclopedia Brown types of 'mini Mysteries'.. Little stories that one reads that involve some kind of logic puzzle. The Thomas P. Stanwick Mini Mysteries are of this sort, and that's not what I want.
Here are the ones I could think of:
1. John and Mary are lying on the floor. Both are dead, and they are lying in a puddle of water and broken glass. They are alone in the house, the door is locked from the inside, and one window is open three inches. What happened?
2. A man lies murdered in an alley. He is surrounded by 53 bicycles. What happened?
3. Two men are sitting in chairs in a cabin on a mountain top. They are alone, both are dead. What happened?
4. Two men are in the middle of a desert. Both are wearing a pack. One has an empty pack, and he's alive. The other has a full pack and he's dead. What happened?
5. Willie lies in a field, dead. Near him is a sock. What happened?
6. A man wakes up and opens his blinds. He sees that it is a bright, beautiful morning. He shoots himself immediately. Why?
7. An old, blind seacaptain walks into a seafood restaurant and orders albatross soup. After tasting it, he immediately gets up, leaves the bar, and shoots himself. Why?
8. A man is found hung from rafters, his feet dangling five feet from the ground. Below his feet there is a puddle. The house is otherwise vacant, and the doors were locked from the inside. What happened?
9. Two men go into a bar, and both order the same drink from the bartender. The first one drinks his quickly, the second drinks his slowly. The first man lives, the second man dies. Why?
... and that's all I can remember. Anyone else know of any?
If you want the answers to these, let me know. :)
So Zack has Cub Scout Day Camp this week. It takes place at one of the local parks, and runs from 9:00 am until 3:00 pm. There are something like 200 boys in attendance, and the schedule includes games, crafts, fishing, archery, bb-guns and nature studies. Pretty cool, in theory.
In practice, though, maybe not so much. At the end of the day, I'd give it a D+, maybe a C-. Of course, I didn't go into this with the best attitude either, as I was grouchy that parents were ordered to pick a day and come walk with the kids. It's always billed the same way. "Oh, you won't have to do anything, really. There are instructors at each station that will handle all of the actual activities. You're just there to be a bathroom runner and to keep the groups moving. Easiest thing in the world."... Except that that's never really true, and today turned out to be anything but 'easy'.
For example, the first place the kids were assigned to go was to the BB-shooting range. We got there on time, no instructor to be seen. The boys dutifully lined up at the edge of the field and waited (pretty darned patiently, I thought) for the leader to show up. She finally did, and they all listened eagerly to her instructions.
But right from the start, it was a fiasco. For one thing, the leader was worthless. We have eight boys in our group ranging in age from six to eight, and none of them have ever so much as laid eyes on a BB gun before, much less ever shot one, much less ever misbehaved at a rifle range. But from the way the woman who arrived to instruct acted, you'd think she was dealing with a pack of hardened criminals who had already been on her range for an hour shooting the guns off at everything that moved. The first thing she did once she got everyone's attention was to rattle off a list of rules and threats of consequences should the boys break a rule. I.e. -- "If you yell fire while standing outside the range, I will pull your belt loop."
All the boys looked at each other in confusion. They had no idea what this meant. It hadn't occurred to anyone to yell 'fire'. Why would they yell 'fire'? Were they supposed to yell 'fire' at some point? Maybe they were only to yell 'fire' from inside the range? Or what? And what did she mean by 'pull their belt loop'? None of them had a Bb-shooting beltloop. How could she pull something they didn't have?
Timmy S, who is one of those kids who strongly believes it is his calling to ask the important questions and convey important information just in case the adult in question might simply not have all the facts, says, "But...but we don't HAVE belt loops." I know Timmy; he's not trying to be a smart aleck; in his mind, he's confused and wants clarification. The instructor, though, thought he was being fresh and glared at him until he shrank back and looked to Kathy (his mother) for reassurance. It happened fast, so I don't even know if Kathy noticed, but I did.
At any rate, no one questioned Militant BB Woman. The boys are pretty good boys, all told. Besides, safety on any gun range is important, and I didn't blame her for being strict about behavior on the course. I blamed her for instructing incredibly badly.
Once she had barked out her confusing rules, THEN she went into a fast and spotty explanation as to what the boys would be doing that utterly failed to take into account the lack of experience of all of the boys. She threw around terms none of them had ever heard before, and didn't explain what she meant. She "One of you will be the shooter, one of you will be the loader. The ground is muddy today, so we won't be doing the lying-down position. (The boys looked at each other in confusion again. Lying down position?) Instead you will be doing a kneeling shoot. (Kneeling shoot? Uh..okay.)" She did have a kid there -- probably her son -- who was trying to demonstrate, but she was going fast and he was having a hard time keeping up. Then she realized she'd completely forgotten to explain the safety and had to go back to explain how to take the safety on and off, which confused the boys even more.
Then she paired the boys up and sent them onto the range. At no point did she explain to them that the kids who were shooters would shoot three times, and then the loaders and shooters would switch, so the boys were confused there too. I think Zack, who was a Loader, was under the impression that he just wasn't going to be allowed to shoot. Timmy S. and Alex thought they were supposed to switch off each round, so they did. Militant BB Lady caught them doing this, and stopped everything to yell right in Timmy's face about it.
"WHO told you to switch? Did *I* tell you to switch? I'm talking to YOU, sir. Who told you to switch? He did? Is HE in charge of this range, sir? Are YOU in charge of this range, sir? No. *I* am in charge, You do what *I* tell you to do."
Yeah, sure lady.. except that you didn't tell them! You just sent them out there and yelled, "Fire!". Oh, and apparently SHE is the only one who gets to yell 'Fire'. At least we got THAT sorted out.
The point is, this angry barrage left both Alex and Timmy in tears. They hadn't meant to do anything wrong, hadn't known they were DOING anything wrong. They had made an erroneous assumption, but it was innocently made and hadn't put anyone in any danger.
Kathy was all but twitching with anxiety. She's was watching this enormous bully pick on her son, and was powerless to do anything about it. After all, we're instilling a respect for authority here, and it wouldn't be right to undermine her in front of our boys and the boys from other packs who were waiting to shoot. But holy moly, lady... You're TEACHING LITTLE KIDS HOW TO SHOOT GUNS. That probably isn't wise in the first place, but if you insist upon doing so, YOU HAVE TO DO IT RIGHT. That means you sit them down, you assume they know nothing. You show them the gun, the bullets, the target. You show them the trigger, the safety, the cocking mechanism and explain what they do. You get TWO KIDS to help you demonstrate the Loader/Shooter routine. You explain the importance of safety, stressing that no one should speak on the range aside from the instructor. And you tell the kids what to expect when they actually step onto that range, including who will shoot and when.
And THEN...if they screw up.. THEN you yell at them. And if they're screwing around being little twerps, BY ALL MEANS, make 'em cry. Get it through to them that horseplay on a shooting range is absolutely not to be tolerated under any circumstances. I am RIGHT WITH YOU there. But damn it, do NOT set them up to fail by instructing badly and then yelling at them when they don't understand.
Kathy was ready to cry. I was mad. We quietly railled against the unfairness of it all, and then reacted with predictable dismay when our kids were dismissed from their shooting with 40 minutes left to the hour designated for the shooting. 40 minutes?!
That, we agreed, was rather unacceptable. But it was like that for most of the day. Each activity station was alotted 1 full hour of time, whether they needed it or not.. so if shooting took 20 minutes (and really, the INSTRUCTION alone should have lasted that long) and we were left to entertain eight riled-up boys for that long until we took them on to sports. At that station they had two smallish fields marked out. They divided our group (which was comprised of four different dens) into two groups of 30 boys, and put one on one course playing some kind of frisbee game, and the other on the other course playing soccer.
Picture this for yourself, now. We're not talking about a regulation field here. Just a narrow strip of grass alongside the park road. 30 boys playing soccer with one ball. Try to predict how many injuries, fights and general complaints resulted from THAT scenario. Yikes. Then mentally border that scenario on one side with a strip of wilderness fringed with rampant poison ivy. Getting a good mental picture there? 30 boys. Running. Kicking ONE ball. Poison Ivy.
Fail.
From there we went on to Games, and that was somewhat better. It was structured, the leader was engaged in actually leading the games, and the boys seemed to enjoy it. Even better: it lasted for most of the hour. ;)
Then came lunch. Yay, lunch!
After lunch was easier. We had crafts and then nature. The boys were exhausted, so we were glad to have quieter activities in the afternoon.
We arrived at the Crafts station and discovered with dismay that the powers that be had seen fit to provide the craft instructor with a whopping TWO TABLES at which to sit sixty-odd kids. This meant that only about 20 kids could work on their crafts at a time, and that the other 40 or so had to occupy themselves somehow while waiting for their turn. Two preteen boys had been enlisted to 'lead a game', but come on... 12 year old boys? What sort of game did the leader think they were going to lead successfully? They led some kind of running-around game, and then tried to get the boys to sit down on the lake bank and play a game of 'I Spy'. Our kids were bored, but they were reasonably going along with it. Some kid stood up and said he spied something 'brown', and some boys from another den started guessing variants of 'poop' and finding themselves hilarious for doing so. I went into Camp Wyman Counselor mode, marched over and plunked my big butt down between them. "Hello, boys. That'll be enough of THAT now."
They shut up. And good for them, because I was hot, tired, and irritable. Not a recipe for Patient, Tolerant Wix, let me tell you. Blood might have been shed otherwise, and I think they sort of knew it.
Meh.
With Camp Wyman mode activated, I took charge from then on out. I rounded up our boys, walked them to approximately where Nature was supposed to meet, and sat them all down. "All right. We're going to solve a Mini Mystery." I said, and launched them into the one about John and Mary lying dead on the floor, surrounded by glass and water. I figured if it worked to keep United Way Inner City kids quiet and thinking, it would probably work on eight little suburban boys too.
And I was right. Once they got the idea that they needed to ask questions to learn more before they guessed the answer, they really got into it. And suddenly I was fielding questions from kids I'd never seen before. I looked up and realized the entire group of sixty boys was sitting at my feet, all of them anxious to find out about poor John and Mary and solve the mystery of their senseless deaths.
Kathy started to figure it out at some point and asked the right leading questions, and when they figured out that John and Mary were fish, it was like this huge triumph. It was awesome.
I realized how much I loved being the Nature Instructor at Wyman, and how much I still miss working there.
Anyway, we did survive it, and both Kathy and I agreed that we are VERY GLAD we are not walking with the boys tomorrow. We also plan to put the boys to bed EARLY tonight, because it was clear they were tired today.
Do any of you know any good Mini Mysteries, BTW? Let me be clear on what I want here, though, because apparently there are two different definitions in play currently, and most of the 'Mini Mysteries' I find online are not what I'm after.
So, to be clear: When I think of a Mini Mystery, I think of a very brief scenario (usually only a few sentences) that describes a crime and gives clues as to what happened. These clues are usually somewhat cleverly misleading. The point is to sort out who dunnit/how, etc. by asking yes/no questions of the teller. The teller can only answer yes, no, or 'not relevant'.
When I do a search online, I get a lot of Encyclopedia Brown types of 'mini Mysteries'.. Little stories that one reads that involve some kind of logic puzzle. The Thomas P. Stanwick Mini Mysteries are of this sort, and that's not what I want.
Here are the ones I could think of:
1. John and Mary are lying on the floor. Both are dead, and they are lying in a puddle of water and broken glass. They are alone in the house, the door is locked from the inside, and one window is open three inches. What happened?
2. A man lies murdered in an alley. He is surrounded by 53 bicycles. What happened?
3. Two men are sitting in chairs in a cabin on a mountain top. They are alone, both are dead. What happened?
4. Two men are in the middle of a desert. Both are wearing a pack. One has an empty pack, and he's alive. The other has a full pack and he's dead. What happened?
5. Willie lies in a field, dead. Near him is a sock. What happened?
6. A man wakes up and opens his blinds. He sees that it is a bright, beautiful morning. He shoots himself immediately. Why?
7. An old, blind seacaptain walks into a seafood restaurant and orders albatross soup. After tasting it, he immediately gets up, leaves the bar, and shoots himself. Why?
8. A man is found hung from rafters, his feet dangling five feet from the ground. Below his feet there is a puddle. The house is otherwise vacant, and the doors were locked from the inside. What happened?
9. Two men go into a bar, and both order the same drink from the bartender. The first one drinks his quickly, the second drinks his slowly. The first man lives, the second man dies. Why?
... and that's all I can remember. Anyone else know of any?
If you want the answers to these, let me know. :)