Group Building

I helped with group building on Monday for a group of teachers, administrators, bus drivers, food service people, etc. from a local school. It was interesting.

One hard thing was that these people were not campers. They were not camper sized. I was stationed at the spider web, where the group needs to go through holes in the web that are not so big. They're not supposed to touch the sides, but...most of them were just not going to fit without touching. I had to tell them that I would allow a reasonable amount of touching.

The attitudes of some people were really frustrating. There was one guy who was just a jerk. I don't know if he really didn't want to be there, or he thought he was being funny, or if he's just like that, but he was really hard to work with. He moved ropes on the spiderweb, asked me if I was making up the rules, was rude, and made inappropriate comments. A lot of people didn't take it seriously, and didn't care about whether or not they did things the right way.

Some of these people were older, and walking up and down hills in the woods was just not for them. It wasn't their fault, I don't blame them, but I thought it was weird that the people scheduling group building didn't think about that. Maybe they did. But it took a long time for some groups to entirely arrive at stations because there were a few people who were way behind.

Group building today was a lot better. These people had great attitudes about it. I don't know if they wanted to be there, but they acted like they did. They had fun, they laughed, they took things seriously. They didn't finish a few activities, but they were so much easier to work with than the groups on Monday, and I was glad to get to work with a group like that after the other one.


Something I've realized lately: groups do not listen to me during group building. I don't know if I have a voice that doesn't carry or what. I have the same problem during the summer. I could yell at a kid six times and they didn't hear me, but if I asked someone else to get their attention, they heard them. Maybe I have a really annoying voice that's easy to tune out. I don't know. But it's kind of frustrating.