It’s my first week of camps, where I was a year ago, but in a very different place. Fear’s pent up inside me, watching orientation videos, remembering my first summer of teaching, and I’m not sure if I can do it again, not how I did.
Is this how it was, or am I different?
The Rome Camp:
My first camp with ACLE lasted two weeks, and I don’t think it could have gone any longer. Sometimes you luck out. Sometimes you don’t. I had an amazing host family, worked with incredible people, and could see Roman ruins from my window. However many amazing people, however amazing things, nothing cancels out managing a group of eight-year-olds who. . .
Who. . .
Who just don’t.
When I don’t luck out, I call my students Crazies (and Monster Children when they’re not around). This camp was full of monster children. It was a monster camp — a romping stomping camp of monsters—it was rare that in craziness, sometimes we found a synergistic bliss-tornado of fun.
In games, we threw our shoes across the room, and I threw balls out of windows. Mostly, they didn’t listen. The kids called me crazy, and I called them Crazies. Who was crazier? You’d had to have been there.
After two weeks, I’m sore in the throat and covered in glitter. How, you ask?
Warm-up Circle—the best part of ACLE camps, hands down, no questions, please.
In this camp, we rocked that thing for an hour, games and all; our shortest was forty-five minutes. Warm-up Circle is supposed to take thirty minutes, but that bliss-tornado took hold. Sometimes you gotta ride that pony.
It was over thirty-five degrees Celsius, but I think Italy is so hot that hotter is meaningless to the sweat stains on my shirts (and elsewhere).
At the end of each day, I was the child of a dance beneath fire, the ragged remains of patience, left to play guitar on a balcony as the sun set across Rome.