Reflections on Sec 1 Camp

Today, I just came back from my Term 1 sabbatical: Sec 1 camp

After I came back from my camp, I realise that I had learnt alot of facilitation and also soft skills that could be used in my daily life.

In fact, we the organising team had actually planned alot of interesting activities for the Sec 1s to enjoy. However, the weather was bad and it was raining cats and dogs on all the camp days. Thus, this made us very demoralised, as our planned activities had to be stopped and intervene due to the weather and we need to execute out the wet weather plan, which was not as fun as the activities played on the open field. This is actually similar to our daily life challenges. Whatever we planned to do, we must always get ready for the obstacles caused by external factors. Just like the ever-changing and unpredictable weather, we must always have a backup plan in case our original plan might not work due to unexpected dire factors.

When we let the Sec 1s had their lunch, there was chaos as the dining tentage was rather small and could not fit everyone inside. The students were loud and noisy and nobody is giving attention to the instructions, with students running everywhere and taking the food here and there, without cleaning up their mess. Therefore, we learnt our lesson from our first experience, and we all agreed to have order next time. Thus, we put safety tapes around the dining tentage except for a small opening, where people exit and enter from there. We staggered the timing, such that some went to bath while others went for their dinner and vice versa after a period of time. We also ensured that the 2^nd shift is to wait outside the opening before the 1^st shift moved in. Therefore from this, I could learnt that whenever we are managing a large group of people, we must always have order and a fixed rule to prevent chaos and getting into trouble. We could do this not just by shouting to get the attention, but also marked out a certain boundary and also people to patrol around to make sure that there are order and the people are adhering to the rules at all times.

After we set up the boundary and the safety tape, many of the students took shortcut and bent underneath the safety tapes or even cross over it. This is very chaotic, if all of them is to go up and down by the safety tapes and there was be no use in the safety tapes. Therefore, we sent some people to patrol around the safety tapes area and prevent people from crossing the safety tapes. This caused some of the students to be unhappy and one even tear down the safety tape. One of the teachers witnessed that and reprimanded that student. From this incident, I could learn that we must deal with people at the correct time and point them out individually so as to let them know their mistakes. We must also make sure that we must put ourselves in others shoes and talk to them politely, but of course not let them crawl over your head. If necessary, we could scold that student if he refuses to behave appropriately by not embarrassing him in front of the crowd, but just point out his mistakes after stopping him.

Overall, I realise that after my sabbatical (Sec 1 camp), I learnt better to act accordingly to the situation, like in the case of wet weather plan. I also learnt how to execute out my actions properly and let myself be heard in order to get the attention of the whole Sec 1 cohort. Overall, I had an enjoyable time in my sabbatical in serving the Sec 1s and watching them enjoy the camp.