Anxiety dropped the year we bought real tents. The students slept better, and my field staff got their nights back.
In the 2000-teens, I directed an outdoor ed program at an international school in Korea. The shelters the student groups slept in were mega mids, which are floorless tarps with a pole in the center. It’s like a mini circus tent, and it only works when the whole thing stays taut.
Our mids were special.
It’s a long story, but we brought the tarps from the U.S., and, for some reason I can’t quite remember, the poles didn’t make it through customs. So, in the early days of the program, we had to source custom-made poles so we could use our new shelters.
The poles never quite worked right. The extension, which is how you’re supposed to make the whole thing taut, would slip after just a few minutes of it being fully erected. The result was a droopy, saggy mid that further destabilized the center pole. The pole would inevitably fall, and the whole shelter would come crashing down on the young people inside of it, who were doing their best to get their Zzz’s before the next full day of adventure and learning.
These things were challenging. However, their lightweight design helped reduce pack weight for students. Additionally, students gained essential craftsmanship skills, such as ensuring everything fits tightly, and developed perseverance by dealing with bugs that slipped through from beneath, as mids don’t have bug screens.
When a pole shifts a little, the shelter goes off balance and the fabric sags. On a good night, the student sleeping closest to the center pole would inevitably be tasked with making sure the thing stayed fully erect, which entails waking up to raise and “lock-in” the extension, or ensuring it stayed precariously stacked on the rocks they’d add beneath it to bypass the extension altogether.
On a bad night, wind and rain would cause the whole mid to come down on a group. Students and instructors would have to get up in the dark, get soaked, and do their best to quickly stash their sleeping bags to stay as dry as possible, and set it back up.
It was like that for years.
The first participants of the program and the school’s early graduates talked about the shelters as a bit of folklore. The younger students coming into the program started their outdoor ed journey utterly terrified.
It was cute, and in some way it made me proud. It was part of the program’s reputation, and it was good that they were telling stories about our courses.
Of course, students and parents complained every year and after nearly every course. I carefully explained that the mids were part of the program’s larger experience and challenge. The challenge was, actually, the point. These weren’t fun field trips; they were experiences designed to push students to overcome social, eco, and physical anxiety. After all, that’s what character development is all about, right?
Then, my own field staff started making the same complaints.
I perked up, because their complaints meant something different to me. They were signals about the program’s overall effectiveness and its very purpose. They offered a simple solution that would change students’ and parents’ whole perception of the program. A few months ago I wrote about staff breaking protocol as data, a complaint from an experienced instructor is the same kind of information.
Tents.
Buy…I mean…invest…in real tents. They have floors, rain flys, guy lines, and poles. They hold up better in the wind and the rain, they keep bugs out, and everyone will sleep better. The *trauma* passed down from grade level to grade level will end.
The head of school immediately approved. Buying a whole inventory of new tents was outside our annual budget, but she didn’t blink. Her own kids knew firsthand the daily mid struggles. We purchased them all from a manufacturer in Korea. Every piece was built for its purpose, and we could just send an annual box of repairs via the local post.
The kids celebrated. My colleague announced to a whole grade level in the auditorium at the end of year, and they literally stood up and cheered.
Holy cow. I misread the whole situation all these years.
Over the next few years, we saw that students and instructors slept better. Anxiety dropped, and engagement and buy-in to the program skyrocketed. The field staff got their nights back. The “learning” and “character development” we protected came at the expense of everything else the program offered. In the end, the staff and students were able to go deeper into the curriculum, and students were able to learn more from the wind, the rain, and the river.
A few weeks ago I wrote about the container your field staff work inside, and about the trade-offs that program directors make to build it.
Program administration is about setting field staff up to succeed. The container determines whether they deliver the learning goals safely and ethically, or spend the night holding up a tent pole and debriefing the kids to “keep pushing through and do it better next time.”
This week, pick one persistent complaint you hear every season. If you do nothing about it, what’s the cost to your program, and the community of people you work with and serve? Then ask yourself, what’s the cost to fix it, in money, time, effort, and pride?
Is it worth it?
P.S. The belief that character is developed through struggle is old and persistent in outdoor education. I wrote about where its roots on my website, in the Struggle as Proof blog.