Quick something before we start.
Want to spend a week with me doing the best behavior management training you can imagine?
The Skywild Inclusion Specialist Training is November 8-14 at North Star Reach in Michigan.
You know the kids who struggle to fit at camp? Come learn how to support them. 3 days of training. Then 3 days putting it to work for real at Skywild’s Summit program for neurodivergent adults.
You walk out with two certifications: Youth Mental Health First Aid and Safety-Care.
It’s the best professional development I have ever done. My bad-ass girlfriend leads it. I’ll be there.
Normally $799. The first 5 people who apply get in free.
Apply here:
Questions? Email Ash Dunn at ash@campskywild.org
All right, let's talk camp stuff...
It's college and job application season, which means I'm writing recommendations right now for former campers and staff.
Dartmouth. Wake Forest. Michigan. Skidmore.
Art sales. Teaching positions. JP Morgan.
If you run a camp, you've probably got a pile of these going too.
I definitely don't miss applying for college or for jobs, but I do have to say I kind of love writing these.
Each one is this awesome reminder of someone amazing who went to camp or worked at camp. And I’m like, “man, these camp kids are going places.”
And it also has me thinking about the Hakuba Forum, where Breezy and I met with educators from some of these amazingly elite schools around the world.
What Is A Teacher For
There was a lot of talk at the forum about AI, and what the world looks like when it's full of bots and LLMs and apps that answer almost any question you have and build whatever you ask them to.
The role of a teacher used to be this whole bundle of things, but a huge piece of it was transferring information from the front of the classroom to the kids sitting in the rows and rows of desks out there in the crowd.
The best info is now just a click or question away. Which means the standing-at-the-front-delivering-information piece of the job is getting smaller and smaller.
So these schools are asking two big questions:
What does it mean to teach and learn in this new future?
What does it look like to train the next generation of great teachers?
We talked about this a ton and for real: camp counselors might be the best at the moment for where this training really happens.
We camp people have never been that focused on the skills transfer. It’s always been focused on the connection and vibes piece of things.
Are the next generation of the world's best teachers leading campfires in the woods right now? Probably.
Honestly, the last generation of the world's best teachers were probably camp counselors too, in so many ways.
Ali pulls reports from CampMinder all year long →
Which kids are coming back? What areas are families from? Who still needs medical forms? Answers in like 30 seconds instead of digging through 47 spreadsheets.
The kind of data that actually helps us make decisions.
Check out CampMinder!
Doing And Being
The schools at the forum are doing hard, impressive work on all of this.
Lots of them are building project-based learning, giving kids the space to have interesting ideas and build things. And then they spend hours and hours building assessment tools to measure how it's going, because that's the world they have to answer to. They need some numbers to back it up.
Thankfully, I’m not writing progress reports each summer, but this did have me thinking that current education is really good at doing, and not really good at being. (This was their version, not mine fwiw)
Camp is the flipped version. Nobody gets tested at camp. Kids have space to not be tested, space to not have all this pressure to succeed put on them. They just get to succeed by being.
And kids are at camp for weeks at a time. It might be the only place on the planet where they get this kind of break to take care of themselves while living in a really healthy place.
It's as if ice cream was good for you. They love it that much, and it happens to be giving them the space to build the best skills there are.
The Three Types Of Camp Parents
Jason Cody Douglass was at the forum. Has degrees (plural) from Yale and runs The Innovation Fellowship, a school in Tokyo. He says there are three types of parents who send their kids to a school like his, or a camp like ours.
The entrepreneur types, whose lives didn't follow a linear path. They get it immediately, and they don't need their kids to follow one either.
The achievement parents, who see that kids from these places end up at the best schools, and that all of this really works for high-level achievement.
And the "it's all gonna be fine" parents, bought in because who cares, none of the stakes matter anyway.
You probably have all three at your camp. I know I have all three at mine.
Jason's point was that for the educators, the point is the whole kid, and the byproduct happens to be that lots of kids get into Yale and Dartmouth and whatever. For plenty of families, it runs in the other direction.
Some of this is self-selecting, obviously. A lot of these kids were ending up at great schools no matter what. But it’s worth knowing about for every kid, because we are trying to get every kid to camp.
Back To The Letters
Our camp kids tend to be really driven. Our camp families tend to be really driven. Camp gets to focus on the being side all summer because the kids live the rest of the year inside all of that doing.
Which brings me back to the recommendations.
The kids I'm writing about spent their summers at a place with no tests and no grades. And even without those things, it's so easy to write about how they're going to succeed inside of institutions and jobs that require the skills needed to crush tests and ace report cards. All while feeling whole and staying connected to the people around them.
Honestly, when you think about it that way, the letters kind of write themselves. I bet yours do too.
You got this,
Jack
