By Valerie Bonet
It was the summer before I entered college when I got a call from a family friend asking if I wanted a summer job; at this time I knew I was about to be a broke college kid so I said yes without hesitation. I had gone in nervously for my interview – my first interview ever – and surprisingly, it was over in about thirty minutes. After that I went back and forth trying to figure out if the thirty minutes was quick or slow, if I made a good or bad impression and just kept thinking about my interview. After days of overthinking my interview, I finally get a call saying that I have a summer job. We had to have a meeting before I was officially accepted into the job to understand what the job would entail. I was told that the job would be a summer camp based on the cognitive development of children with learning disabilities. Although there were only twelve children, their age ranged from five to thirteen so they let me know it wouldn’t be easy. To do this we would play brain games with them from eight in the morning to three in the afternoon.
My first day there I realized that I would be working with three other camp counselors in order to help these kids as efficiently as possible. We would meet an hour before the camp started to figure out how we were going to set up everything for that day but as the weeks went by, their time commitment began to fade and they would show up late or not really go with the plan we had set in motion for that day. The kids were supposed to be split up into four groups, but they would often neglect their group in order to play basketball or video games on their phone. It wasn’t always great to be pushed over into teaching the kids in their group as well and I knew that it was time to step up and have an open and honest conversation with them. We all needed to put our minds together in order to help the kids thrive and do so in a way that made it easy on us because it was not easy teaching these children, especially not all at once. The kids were so far in age that playing games together was difficult. In the process they would get upset and the older kids would taunt the younger calling them dumb cause some weren’t able to read and then the younger kids would get upset – it was just an endless circle. The kids would then gang up together because they were upset that they were at a camp to learn and not to have fun. Some wouldn’t listen to me because I was shorter than them so as you can imagine it wasn’t easy on a day to day basis. Between the hardships helping the children and the issues working with the other counselors, I thought that we would never find a way for this camp to work.
Every day I would come home confused and would rethink situations in my head and kept trying to find a way for this camp to somehow have a seamless day to day flow. I had to figure out that each and every person is different and the way that you approach them is different too, whether it is a kid or a co-worker. Each of the kid’s had different skills also and it is imperative that we highlight those skills and not only tell them when they’re wrong, but reward them when they do something good. I finally stepped up and told our co-workers that we needed a new system if we ever wanted to actually help these kids. Since these children had learning disabilities, their social skills were not as developed. We tried to isolate them from another because we were afraid of what they would say since they weren’t used to being put in group settings. I knew that I needed to step up as a leader and try to find out how to help them develop better social skills. I researched and researched and figured out I had to understand each and every child’s necessities. I them talked to the other counselors about it we each discussed ways we thought we could help them. We somehow found a way to merge out ideas together and began to read them more stories about children and their feelings to let them know that it’s okay to feel things and how you shouldn’t project negative things onto other people because they have feelings as well. We continued to do this, and we saw them being more empathetic to other children but the biggest change in them happened when they saw how other people around them behaved. To be able to lead well you need to do well. You can’t just expect everything to fall into place, it will only work if you lead by example. As co-workers, we all started to work together better after we were more honest about what was working in the camp and what we felt needed improvement. We didn’t take it as critical, we took it as constructive criticism because if it was going to help everyone in the end, it should be talked about. As we started to get along better, we saw the same change in the kids in the camp. Of course, there were still hiccups but we found ways to work together to get over it. I guess that is what shocked me the most from this whole journey. I always thought a leader was a lone wolf and was the sole person that helped everything work well. That couldn’t be further from the truth though. In order to be a good leader, you need to work together to have a solution because it is inevitable that people are going to have ways to solve a problem that you had never even thought of before. At first, I was upset because I didn’t think of the solution that someone else thought of, but that shouldn’t be what it’s about. As long as we solve the problem it doesn’t really matter who comes up with the idea because leading is implementing that solution and actually being able to make a difference with others, not just trying to fix everything by yourself.