Tales From a Summer Camp: Bad Idea

(Sorry for all the low-content posts lately, I do plan on getting some more poker-related stuff going soon. For now, enjoy the filler!)

One summer during college I worked at a day camp for kids from Cambridge. Most people know the city for Harvard and MIT, but actually a good chunk of it is projects and other low-income housing. The camp consisted mostly of minority youth from low-income backgrounds, but there were a few white kids there because they didn’t have money for camp either or because their liberal academic parents wanted them to experience brown people. I was primarily responsible for a group of twelve 7- to 9-year-olds.

Most activities at the summer camp were scheduled, either field trips or “classes” like art, library, music, etc. These activities were always led by a specialized member of the staff, and those of us who were just group leaders kind of helped out as needed but weren’t in charge at those times. Most days the kids got at least half an hour for “recess”, which was time for which I as a group leader was primarily responsible for occupying them.

The camp was at an elementary school with a playground, so as long as the weather was nice I just took them outside and let them run around like idiots for their recess. Granted this made things easy for me, so I’m a bit biased, but I think it was also legitimately what the kids preferred to do. They enjoyed having time to just play in a way that wasn’t scheduled and organized.

The camp’s director started getting on my case that I ought to plan activities for the recess period, so I asked him for suggestions. One game that really caught on with the kids involved blindfolding one of them and having them all run around in a big circle. The blindfolded kid tries to tag one of the others, who becomes the new blindfolded tagger. Anyone who runs out of the circle counts as tagged and has to take over the blindfold role.

Anyone with any experience with kids will correctly guess that they all wanted to be the blindfolded one and would complain if they weren’t chosen. So it occurred to me that since this role was so popular, I could blindfold two kids and make them both “It”.

Of course, the kid in the blindfold is trying to tag the others based on the sound of their running feet, so her “strategy” usually consists of lunging and swinging wildly in the direction of the nearest sound. Perhaps you can see where this is going. Within two minutes, the two blindfolded kids had run headfirst into each other and were both lying on the ground crying.

As I was dusting them off and consoling them, one of the other kids tugged on my sleeve. “What is it?” I asked, a little annoyed that he was demanding my attention when there clearly others who needed it more.

He looked up at me sagely and said in his nasally 8-year-old’s voice, “I think this was a bad idea.”