Day 14

Have I really been blogging for 2 weeks?

I suppose now wouldn't be a bad time for a really reflective piece on the entirety of camp and this job.

After having done half of one session here at this camp, I feel confident in suggesting that being an RA is about managing judgment. I don't mean this exclusively in the context of punishment or discipline, which is something all RAs have to learn how to do and do effectively. Rather, I mean this in a broader sense about the nature of the job.

So much of being an RA, particularly at a camp for more academic students, starts before any action is taken or any interaction occurs between an RA and a student. We judge, as camp counselors, certain activities to be fun, or at least judge our expectations from our superiors to warrant certain degrees of enthusiasm before activities. We judge certain situations to deserve a conciliatory tone when confronting a student, and other situations to deserve a bark or an order or a serious glare.
However, the most critical, and most dangerous judgments, we make as RAs is of the students. We judge certain students to be problem students, and color our actions and our language accordingly. Other students we judge to be adorable and deserving of recognition. I have always been a judging type of person. Most people judge others whether they like it or not, and the ones who don't are most likely lying. The problem, naturally, is what to do when those judgments do not match the reality of a student's personality or unfairly color how we talk or deal with a student's problems.

I took some time today during my down time to think about how I judged certain students at the beginning of camp and compared them to how they have acted over the course of this first week. I knew that most of the judgments I made at first would probably be incorrect and would change, and acknowledged this from the beginning. I knew better than to think that nothing would change about how I thought about these kids or how they acted in three weeks. I knew better day 1, and I know better now.

That didn't change how...surprising it all was when I really made some comparisons though. Kids I thought would be angels and cause little trouble now are the sources of most of my stress each day. Kids I found obnoxious and annoying the first couple of days are now favored in my mind. I guess what bothers me is that favoritism. Probably the one student here who troubles me the most was a student that I gave subtle preferential treatment at the beginning of the camp because he came across as so friendly and cool to me. Don't get me wrong, I didn't let him break any rules or anything serious, but I know that the way that I approached and communicated to this student was substantially different than how I talked to other students. And really, that's all that it takes. Rhetoric and language and the method of communication so easily shapes how students feel about their RAs, their activities, the camp itself, the discipline structure, the activities, that it is no small thing to admit that I have mentally snared and found my own instances of flawed and misguided judgment. To know that how I talk to this student has changed so dramatically, from near-preferential niceness to borderline snappy disciplinarian, forces me to think hard about other students that I judge to be good students and other students I judge to be problem ones.

Also, have I mentioned how bad this heat wave is?

Signing off,
Kevin