No update for a little while, here, and it’s going to continue. I’m basically planning a summer camp here, and while I’m delegating some of the work out, most of the people haven’t done it before, and given the way our one meeting went, I have figured out that meetings aren’t going to be a very effective way of passing on the extant camp structure.
That’d be less of a problem if most of the staff were experienced with this camp, or if we were planning it from the ground up. But since we’re not creating it from scratch, and since most people haven’t experienced it before, it’s necessary to:
- Not try to change the camp structure too much, or we’ll end up with a disordered, directionless mess, and
- To communicate clearly to all the teachers on staff exactly what is extant, what are the underlying principles and models for activities, which can be used to design the few new activities we’re adding
I managed to delegate some of the responsibilities, but not all of the important ones, because there was a lot of extraneous talk going on. I’m not really good at being patient with people who talk off-topic a lot and make meetings stretch to much more than the planned length, while preventing clear discussion from happening.
But I am getting better at finding workarounds for it. One of them is documentation. So I’m doing up some docs for some of the activities in the camp, and documenting models we use, and then I’ll pass that out. this will also circumvent the “Let’s sit and gab” element at camp meetings, which happen daily, because we’ll all have something in front of us to refer to. And we’re going to need to circumvent the gab during meetings because
- I am not eating camp food anymore, it’s just too disgusting to me now, and meetings are usually held right after dinner, but that means waiting through dinner to have the meeting, which is worse than you can imagine
- The meetings are already draining on their own, as camp drags on, and
- As camp drags on, my patience gets too short to sit through pointless, extraneous gab.
I have half the thing documented from only a few hours of work this afternoon, and I should have the restexcept for things other people need to design and documentdone by Friday.
If there’s another camp in the works, which there is supposed to be, though we’ll see how this one goes and how much more crazy the demands for the next one become, this will also cut down on the amount of time needed to train new people in, and lessen the pressure on experienced people to re-plan and re-implement the camp. (And lessen their reliance on faulty memory, as well.)
But this does render me too busy to post anything of value here. Ah well… you’ll live.
Check back later. Lots on the stove, so I’ll have lots to say soon.