Three crazy stories from my time working at a summer camp.

It has been a fair amount of time since I officially left the field of childcare. I spent a good amount of time working in childcare, during that time I did experience some things that I would describe as being surprising and even a little on the shocking side. I decided that I would share some stories from my career. The following stories take place while I was working for a Rec department. I spent part of that summer working at a day camp for kids that were around the ages of 9 - 11. During this camp we went on a good amount of field trips. Let me tell you if you have never taken a large group of kids out in public you are lucky. With that being said let's get to the stories.

1. Not adding up - If you have ever worked with kids, you know that one of the most important things you need to know is how many kids you have and what their names are. This story takes place on a day that we were taking the campers to go swimming at a high school pool. Before getting on the bus, we did a role call and determined how many kids we had. However, the lead camp instructor noticed that our role call did not reflect the number of kids that were on the bus. We kept on counting, and we kept on getting one more child, then the roll call sheet said we that we should have. I thought it was possible that maybe a camper from another group had snuck on to the bus with our group. The lead camp instructor had the bus driver pullover, and we took roll again. When we took roll call, a kid that had not previously answered during roll call earlier answered. It turned out that either we had not heard this student respond during roll call or they had not heard us call their name. It tuned out to be a simple misunderstanding but it was stressful and confusing while we tried to figure out why the number of campers on the bus did not match the number of campers that we had marked on our attendance sheet.

2. confiscating weapons - Arts and crafts are an important part of most summer day camps, including the one I worked at. One day, some of the campers really let their creativity go wild when they taped wooden craft sticks together with some pretty strong tape, and they sharpened the end of the craft sticks using scissors. The craft sticks now had a very sharp and dangerous point at the end of them. When I saw what the campers were creating, I notified the camp leader who helped me confiscate the dangerous craft projects. I was frustrated and upset that some of the campers had created something that could hurt themselves or others, but I have to admit that It was pretty creative.

3. Water rescue - During one of our outings to a public pool, I ended up having to help a child that was in destress, but the situation was not that straightforward. One thing that was very challenging about going to public pools or water parks was that the campers could not wear their camp shirts because they had to be in swimwear. This made it harder to tell the campers apart from the other kids at the pool or water park. At one point during this particular trip to the public pool, I was in a shallow pool supervising the campers when a life guard staring shouting at me to grab a kid. I was confused as to which kid he was talking about at first. Then, after a few seconds of me being confused and the life guard continuing to yell at me, I saw a young child who was panicking and struggling to keep his head above the water. I quickly recognized that the child was not a part of our camp, but that did not matter at that moment. I quickly swam over to where the child was, and I gently pulled him over to an area of the pool where he could stand up without his head going under the water. When the child was safe and calm, the life guard told the child that he needed to stay where he could touch the bottom of the pool. The life guard seemed to be annoyed about the satiation and did not seem to be very concerned at all for the child's safety. My guess is that the life guard had already interacted with that child and did not want to fill out more paperwork, so he had a random adult that he didn't know help the child to safety. I was the most upset about this story because, like me, that life guard was responsible for keeping others safe, and it did not seem like he took that responsibility very seriously.

Thank you for reading my stories, and if you are looking for a job, I would advise you to not chose childcare.