How to misrun a summer camp

I guess you’re curious about how Camp Espana works. Well, it’s very interesting. Let’s start off by reviewing the general American camp paradigm. By late Spring you’d have the final list of campers, with a deposit paid. You’d have one, potentially two, waves of arrivals: at the beginning of camp and midway through. And you’d split the campers into bunks by age, with each bunk getting its own schedule of daily activities.

Now I will tell you how to run a camp completely counter to all the best practices. First, you have arrivals and departures each week and send staff on random excursions to the airport. Campers sign up at the last minute and arrive with 4,000 euros in cash to pay for their stay. You never know exactly who’s coming until they arrive so you don't bother planning who will live with whom: when someone arrives, you try to sort our their accommodations. 

There are no bunks. Staff are responsible for coordinating activities, but there are no counselors bringing campers to activities, so campers congregate at the pool (where there are no activities).

I'm responsible for waking up the kids on my block each morning. This is the closet thing we have to a bunk, but I'm not responsible for these campers except for wakeup and lights out. You usually need to visit kids 3 times to get them up – once way before they actually have to be up, and they just go back to bed. The second time they’re again fast asleep and it’s just a few minutes before breakfast starts. And then the third time they’re already 10 minutes late and you have to tickle their feet, blow a whistle in their ears, pour water on their faces, or snatch the sheets. 

After breakfast total chaos ensues. My Spanish class begins right after breakfast but I can't both corral my students and start the class at the same time. We hold class in the lounge of the girls' residential tower rather than in actual classrooms. It's demotivating but I still work hard to come up with lessons. For instance, in one lesson we learned the imperative – commands to tell someone to do or not to do something, like “Get in here” or “Go away.” Then we watched a youtube clip from a Spanish TV show. I transcribed the dialogue so we could read through it line by line, go over what everything meant, and learn useful vocab. Then we performed the dialogue ourselves. 

After lunch there are supposed to be activities but usually there aren’t. Occasionally the camp director announces at lunch that there will be a camp-wide activity after lunch and we scramble to plan it. We don’t have any planning or dedicated days for these activities, it's just: "Surprise!"  The kids hate doing activities during the hottest part of the day so it’s like pulling teeth.

We have dinner at 7 or 8pm, then a mandatory night time activity. The older kids sneak away from the night activity to smoke, drink, and fornicate. We have to try to catch them. The camp grounds have a ton of hiding places: mission impossible. Campers are not allowed in the rooms of the opposite sexes but we catch them every
day: luckily, I haven't caught anyone engaged in sexual activity or doing drugs. They probably know where to go so we don't catch them.  We have also sent two kids home for bad behavior but weren't among our worst-behaved, they just got unlucky.

At lights out we just separate the girls and boys and shepherd the girls to their building. The boys sometimes run around camp like testosterone-spiked monkeys yelling and breaking street lamps but we don't mind. 

I'm looking forward to camp being over so I can go to Barcelona to detox.