I'm supervising...

[kyrasantae]

... eighteen 9- to 11-year old boys (and also two girls) at science camp this week. Oh joy! They're quite a handful.Actually, one of the boys is 8. We would conveniently ignore this, but it's kind of hard to.

We took the kids on a field trip to the city airport so that they could get rides in little Cessna airplanes. They also got to visit a museum and look at old planes and aviation (mostly Air Force) memorabilia. Me and the other volunteer were partly responsible for walking the kids between the airport and the museum and keeping them together inside...

...which didn't happen too much.

• Holding 20 kiddies in a room with no windows and nothing to do is anarchy. Especially when the room belongs to other people and they're horsing around touching everything that doesn't belong to them. Forbid that and they start throwing paper at each other.
  
• Authority figures lose legitimacy when rules are enacted reactively too often. Children at this age are very concerned about "fairness" and are able to perceive such actions as signals that control over them has been lost. This is a central observation to classroom management.
  
• A small but significant group of the boys are really really into WWII armaments (I guess WWI is a bit too...manual (to some extent) for their tastes). Like, really into, doubtlessly facilitated by all the movies and historically "accurate" video games out there these days. Except that at this age their enthusiasm is not yet moderated by the sobering understanding of the value of human life. This saddens me; I sometimes cannot bear it and must walk away. I have conveniently forgotten whether I had classmates with similar interests when I was that age.
  
• "Can I go say 'you suck' to the picture of Hitler?" "Of course you can."
  
• Once upon a time, children's horseplay might be pushing and shoving and throwing things and sparring with sticks, but now they just pretend to shoot each other and don't learn that conflict inflicts pain. (I preferred to play Knights and Ninjas back then anyway.)
  
• The anarchy was driving us grownups totally up the wall. I snapped at this one boy who was being a smartass and mocking my exhaustion ("Imitating people to make fun of them is extremely disrespectful.")
  
• The blazing sun was exhausting all of us. Even the kids were asking us "when are we going inside?" I had a headache that was kind of going on and off that only really briefly went away if I was eating or drinking something. It got even worse after I went home.
  
• Last night I was so physically tired that my feet and my headache were practically killing me, I managed to wake up at 6AM this morning, dragged my aching legs out of bed to call in sick (even were it not for the pain, I really needed some time for my patience to recover), then tried to sleep through some construction beeping (I'd almost forgotten how annoying it was), got out of bed to make some lunch, ate it, then went back to sleep until 4PM. My head still hurts a bit, not quite as much, but the rest of me felt like it was falling apart. I hate being a girl sometimes (yes, that was a contributing factor to both crankiness and pain).