Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

I was talking about the evening part of the first day (or night) of the Student Leadership Camp I helped oversee.

It was the first session in the camp that lasted longer than the expected time allotment.

The Self Awareness activity before dinner ended before dinner was supposed to start, so the facilitator just gave it to the students as some personal down time prior to proceeding to the central lobby, where our packed meals were left by the cafeteria personnel whose shifts were supposed to end at 5pm.

But for the schedule allotted to the sharing between the student council officers of two different campuses in the system, and the consultation forum among the people in charge of the recognized student organizations, we went for more than two hours.

It wasn’t so much that our newly elected, appointed or volunteering representatives had a lot of questions relevant to our designated scope, but that the experienced visitors from the school in the province to our west did have a lot of information and opinions to offer, again some of it out of topic, but I wasn’t going to interrupt their momentum tell them that.

Twenty five percent of the students who attended brought their own tents, which they set up in the middle of the covered court. These they were able to share with about half of the participants. The rest slept out in the open air on bedrolls or portable mattresses that they brought.

Of course there was still a small portion of the group who couldn’t sleep in the unfamiliar surroundings, and spent most of the night walking around a place that they have only seen in the daylight before, and not almost empty and dark.

This is something that we will have to anticipate for the repeat camp next year, and maybe not set it for three nights, because productivity, attention spans and participation was definitely down during the second morning because of the general lack of rest the night before.

Another alternative is naturally to have the event in a venue that is more prone for relaxation, most likely away from the campus and in a vacation setting.

The hour set for having breakfast and for the students to shower was definitely not enough. For the start of the a.m. agenda of Day Two, the subject matter was the next logical step after self awareness: working in a team.

This was led by the second of the two adult or professional facilitators we invited. He still used a computerized slide presentation, but what was notable about it was that he inserted some brain teasers every few screens.

They gave the students another team building activity he gave them before lunch. This was the one where given certain catch phrases, the participants were supposed to give stock replies and either stand up or sit down while their chairs were arranged in an inward looking circle. What they found out after the first round – a painful shock for at least one student - was that some of the chairs were quietly removed by the facilitators.

I’ll talk about the consequences of this next time. This has been session number 595. Class dismissed for now.