At our recent Big Bear Village nature camp we instituted a new tradition. At the end of the session, the oldest kids were sent out on a supervised “survival” outing. I was really impressed by the way that it worked out and we will definitely be doing it again. However, after camp one of the parents submitted some feedback that she was concerned about her son being cold on the trip. Of course, she phrased it in a very positive and constructive fashion. Reflecting on her concern I realized that perhaps we sometimes don’t do a good enough job of communicating to families why we do what we do. Everything that we do and teach at Whole Earth Nature School has an intended purpose. In this case, this is what I wrote back to that parent. I think it may be instructive to others who might sometimes wonder why their kids come home a little scratched up after camp.
Hi,
I really appreciate your feedback about your son being cold during the overnight portion of his camp experience. I really value feedback from parents because it always reminds us of how we can be doing better.
I have a feeling that your son may not have communicated well to you or perhaps may not have fully understood the intention behind the overnight that he and his peers undertook. A big part of our philosophy of nature education is based around having students experience nature as directly as possible. The natural world is a much more powerful teacher than any of our instructors could ever hope to be. Sometimes we get kids to experience nature through activities like camouflaging our bodies with mud and crawling through the woods. Sometimes we do it by having kids harvest their own wild food to eat. In this case, we really wanted the kids to have the experience of spending a night in the woods intentionally unprepared. We tried to create a situation that would safely imitate what it would be like if they were actually lost in the forest with just the things they might have carried on a day hike and had to spend the night. In order to do that we limited the amount of gear that they were allowed to bring. Each student brought a knife, a full water bottle, a jacket, a bandanna and a hat in their gear. Additionally, I provided the group with one bowdrill kit and one hatchet to share. They also were able to bring a bag full of the rabbit jerky that they had cut and dried earlier in the week specifically to take on their ordeal. In order to recreate the disoriented feeling that comes with being lost in the woods we blindfolded the kids while they were led to the site where they would spend the night.
I was really impressed how the kids worked through their challenges together. Not only did they manage to create a great shelter to fit all of them, but they worked through hunger, frustration and personal conflicts to get through the night. Perhaps most impressively, they worked diligently on fire making for about five and a half hours before they were finally successful. I know from my own personal experience how frustrating that is to spend so long trying to get fire in a survival situation and they dealt with it amazingly well.
I think that we succeeded in making the overnight survival trip a powerful rite of passage for those kids. In the morning after they erased their shelter we saved a coal from their fire in a “slow match” to transport back to the main camp and contribute it to the cooking fire on Friday. As we returned to camp the whole rest of the camp was waiting to greet them and celebrate their ordeal. All of those kids came away stronger and with a better self knowledge from their experience.
I hope this isn’t an excessive explanation as to why your son was cold on Thursday night. But I do want you to know that it was by design that it happened that way. I read a great article recently about a man who has been blind since he was two years old and who has taught himself to use a form of echolocation to navigate in the world. This man even goes mountain biking alone without the use of his eyes. The most poignant part of the article for me was when the interviewer asks if the man ever gets hurt by running into things. The man’s response was “Sure, it sucks when I run into a light pole. But many blind people are never given the opportunity to experience running into a light pole, and that is a tragedy.” He was saying that never feeling pain is a greater tragedy than feeling a little discomfort now and then.
So, I really do appreciate your feedback. I think that the lesson for me is that in the future we need to do a more thorough job of helping kids understand the purpose of this ordeal and help them have better tools to explain it to their families. That way your son can explain all of this to you in his own words instead of me telling you.
Sincerely,
Matt Bradley
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