meatb0lls
2 Years Experience
Toronto, ON
Male, 27
I worked for 2 years as an overnight camp counselor in the Muskoka Lakes region, a few hours north of Toronto, Canada. Each year, I supervised a cabin of boys between 11-13 years old. I had also been a camper there for seven years, which were formative, to say the least.
That's a great question. Myself? No...but that's probably a function of my own habit of keeping an emotional distance, but that's an issue better left for my shrink than Jobstr:) But it's not at all unusual for counselors to form friendships with their campers that last well into adulthood. That's especially true when a counselor is placed with the same group of kids summer after summer, in which case s/he literally watches these kids grow up, which undoubtedly leads to stronger bonds. I, on the other hand, was only on staff for 2 years and got a different cabin of kids each time. The last day of camp was always a sad one - many hugs and tears. But I always thoughts that that was driven more by the fact that the kids new school was just around the corner than it was because they were actually sorry to leave their counselors. I'm Facebook friends with a few of my former campers now, and it's funny seeing them as, well, adults, when I last saw them over a decade ago as 11-year olds. Thanks for the question:)
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Yeah, one of my two years I had one of the absolute terrors. We knew the bad kids, because they’d come back year after year and every counselor would pray they didn’t get stuck with one. The worst kids are those who would go out of their way to sabotage other kids’ camp experiences. You can deal with a kid if he’s just a little a-hole who likes to talk back because all you really need to do is ignore him – sounds simple, but it worked. But some of these little monsters would go out of their way to test you at every turn by ruining everyone’s day: intentionally spilling food at the lunch table, refusing to put on a life jacket in the sail boat so you couldn’t leave the dock, that kind of stuff. You could “ground” them by making them stay in the cabin during the more fun night-time activities, but in a perverse sense, that just gave them the sense of significance they were looking for all along. If a kid was bad enough, he could either get sent home during the middle of the summer, but more frequently he just wouldn’t be allowed back to camp the following year.
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Some campers would get kicked out every year for theft. Any alcohol or drug use would typically get you booted, too. But first-offender campers usually just got sent home for 3 to 7 days as punishment…and were on probation if they came back. I’m pretty sure any of those offenses would get a counselor fired…as would, I’m sure, any inappropriate behavior with the kids. If you were irresponsible enough with your kids, I’m sure you could get fired for that too, but I don’t remember that happening more than once. All in all, it was pretty rare for staff to get the boot.
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I think most of my campers loved it, but I understand that there are people who just aren’t built for sleepaway camp. It takes a certain amount of independence and social wherewithal to be away from home for 2 months. Even the nerdier kids who got picked on would come back year after year, and seemed sad when camp was over. Most of my kids were 12 to 13 and had been at camp for 3-4 years, having started when they were 8 or 9…so it’s kind of self-selective: most of the camp-haters had been weeded out. And frankly sometimes it's just the luck of the draw as to whether you get along with the kids you get put in a cabin with. I knew a guy in high school who EVERYBODY liked; popular, good at sports, socially adept. And yet he said that the summer he spent at sleepaway camp was the worst of his life and that no one liked him. Which, knowing this guy, seems impossible because he was just genuinely good all-around dude...and yet for whatever reason he just didn't mesh with the cabin of 10 kids he got placed in. Bad luck, I guess.
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EMT
Does your crew ever fake an emergency to slice through traffic?
Sushi Chef
Is there THAT much difference in quality between the fish served at mid-range vs high-end places?
Day Care Provider
Is it ok w/your employer if you babysit one of the kids outside of daycare hours?
It's a little weird, because you have plenty of friends who are a year or two younger and all of a sudden you come back to camp one year and you're a counselor, but they're still paying campers. But that's mitigated somewhat because they never give 1st-year counselors a cabin of older campers (probably because it would be hard for a 17-year old junior counselor to command any sort of authority from a cabin of 15-year olds.) My first year as a counselor I had a cabin of 12 year olds, and my second year I had a cabin of 11-year olds and it's funny to look back on it because they basically look up to you like you're some sort of "adult"...when you're really just some irresponsible teenager who's been charged with making sure other people's kids don't die. It's kind of insane, actually, now that I think about it. The hardest part of it was remembering that you (ostensibly) weren't there to have fun yourself, but to ensure that a good time is had by your cabin of kids. And you're taking them zip-lining and waterskiing, and you want nothing more than to shove them all out of the way so that you can go first...but that would probably be frowned upon. So you learn some discipline in that regard.
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That’s an interesting question – it was interesting to observe the social dynamics of pre-teens from the counselor’s perspective. What I always found fascinating was that there were some nerdier kids who simply kept to themselves, and they were largely left alone by the more popular kids. Conversely, there’d always be some socially awkward kid who “tried a little too hard” to emulate the cool kids and ended up bearing the brunt of their ridicule. Even young boys have a built-in “authenticity” meter; they can see right through a kid who’s pretending to be something he’s not.
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Well, first thing I'll say is that I never saw it nor heard of anything like that happening at my camp. Keep in mind, of course, that most staff (>90%) were former campers whom the camp directors knew well enough from their time as campers to invite them to be staff members when the time came...so that in and of itself would probably filter out a lot of people who had exhibited suspicious behavioral traits. That being said, obviously sexual abuse happens in all environments, often perpetrated by people who no one would ever have suspected...and sleepaway camp is probably an environment that's rife for such activity. That being said, in my 7 years I never heard of anything like that (not even rumors) at my camp, nor any of the surrounding ones. (Disclaimer: send your kid to The Second Mile and all bets are off.)
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