HAPPY VDAY!

haha vday this year was spent with the people below:

des gab hilda shihui shuxian clarice

and alvin ng kok hong who left early to sleeeeepppp after not sleeping for more than 24hrs cause of his road march. POOR THING.

we ate at ri ben chun @ cathay. u know, that place that sells 99cents per plate of sushi. we ate 41 plates! and terriyaki chicken and fried tofu. hoho camp instructors can really eat like pigs! then we wanted to drink at timbre but timbre @ arts house's queue is OMG. so we decided to try timbre @ substation but since i was the only one who've been there, i attempted to bring them there on foot and err haha, we ended up at esplanade cause apparently my sense of direction is cui. so we just sat near the merlion place, ordered 2 cups of starbucks drinks and talked cock and played boom boom chucky chucky! wahaha clarice had to hug and kiss the lamppost as forfeit! then we caught the last train and home sweet home.

luckily i managed to sneak out of the house at night otherwise this year's vday will be zzzzz. camp instructors rock! =DD

I just returned from my Unity Primary camp last Wednesday! OHMYGOSH, the kids are so damn cuteeee! They reminded me of my primary school days when I was still in my pink shirt and pink shorts, with a broad black hairband on my head and running around playing catching! The little boys were expectedly annoying, forever bullying the girls and giving me trouble. But when you start scolding them and telling them that you’re going to tell their teacher about it, tears will start streaming down their faces and you don’t know if you should be firm or lenient with them. Haha kids just cry over everything and anything. And they loveeee complaining to us that so-and-so pulled her hair or so-and-so scolded her stupid and all the crap. Rahh, this is the kind of immature nonsense that I cannot tahan! But at the end of the day at about 11pm, instructors will starting smiling cause the kids are all tucked nicely in bed and we instructors cum nannies can start to slack and relax.

Gosh, being a camp instructor is seriously tiring! We sleep an average of 2-3hrs a day cause the kids are super hyperactive and refuse to sleep so early especially on the first night, and we’ve got sentry duty too! Yes, and I always suay suay get those graveyard hours like 0300-0430 kind zzz. And as long as we’re awake, we always got to be on our guard and keep our eyes on the 20 kids cause if one of them decides to be naughty and plays hide and seek with you, that’s it, you’ll be in hot soup. Then we gotta be punctual for our activities and know how to conduct them correctly with their safety as priority. And most importantly, we need to know how to tell them clear instructions sweetly and shortly cause their attention span is damn short.

Someone asked me if I’m sian over these camps cause the activities are pretty much the same. Well, yeah we teach the campers almost the same things from the same few activities, we teach them the same cheers, we laugh over the same old jokes, but the funny thing is that, we instructors are never tired of them. Or at least to me la. In the first place, why would some crazy idiot even want to spend 3D 2N of their week in that little ulu campsite in lim chu kang so often when the pay as camp instructors is not even high? I think it’s the passion bah.

I think being a camp instructor is an alternative to being a teacher. A teacher teaches things in a classroom while a camp instructor teaches things outside the classroom. And I believe there’s a different degree of funness from both too. Every camp that I’ve done, from Dunman High, West Spring Sec, Bukit Batok Sec, Boon Lay Sec, Siglap Sec to Unity Pri, is a brand new challenge to me. I meet different kinds of kids who come from different schools with different cultures, and from different families with different upbringings. I feel that each of them is special in their own way and we need to deal with them differently. Some instructors are damn fierce to their kids in every of their camps but I feel that especially to upper secondary school kids from the neighbourhood schools, this scolding method will definitely backfire and cause them to be even more rebellion. So I guess we really learn how to handle different kinds of kids and build a good rapport between them. And yes, I’ll be having a camp with Serangoon Gardens Sec @ jbac from 18-20feb. It’s gonna be another challenge for me again and this time, I aim to conduct song session. Wahahaha! Hope I can summon enough courage and be thick-skinned enough to stand in front of the entire cohort and teach them the campfire songs! GO INSTRUCTOR AMELIA! =D

Alright I don’t know what got into me that made me write so much stuff about camp instructors. I guess my next blog entry will either be on my Serangoon Gardens Sec camp or A levels results or about my future life in Australia if I ever get rejected again sigh. Life is short but nevermind, at least I’ll get to see my fellow instructors Shihui, Jackson, Shelly and I hope alot more old faces in my next camp! Wahahaha I feel DAMN OLD cause most of the instructors are younger than me rahh. Till then!

2/14/2009 02:03:00 AM ·