On Scheduled Presence and Peanut-Eating

I spent fifteen hours today at various meetings and workshops to learn all about my responsibilities as an RA, and I really only learned one thing: these kids are *never* to be left alone. They want to go to the bathroom in class, their TA has to walk them there. They want to get a drink during an activity, either find another RA to take them or take all your kids. Even when they think they're alone, they're not. For instance, they are allowed to walk "unattended" to meals and hang out during "unsupervised social time" on the lawn outside the dorms, or so they think. But in reality all the RAs have "scheduled presence" during these times, during which they are supposed to look like they are casually going for a walk or reading on a bench nearby but actually be carefully watching the kids and ready to spring into action should any kid wander past the official CTY boundaries or call another kid a name. I was totally oblivious to this aspect of the camp when I went here as a young nerd, I thought I was being very adult and independent but in reality I guess I was still being babysat. I guess as long as the kids don't realize that while they're here it won't cramp their style too much...

Wait, actually, I learned two things today. The second thing being that while CTY is here, JHU is a peanut-free campus. I didn't even know such a thing existed, but apparently there are enough kids with severe peanut allergies to merit this policy. So any staff that brought peanut products has to eat them all in the next 24 hours or throw them out once the kids get here. At one point one of the administrators actually said, "Peanut-eating, like drinking and smoking, is to be engaged in by staff strictly off campus." Wow.

But other than realizing that my first experience of independence was just a cruel sham and I can't publicly eat peanut butter for the next six weeks, today was pretty fun. All the other RAs and residential staff are really nice and everyone is really excited to be here, which makes me really excited about it too. And I think I'm going to need that excitement once the kids get here, since according to the RAs who have done this before once the actual camp starts you don't have any free time from when the kids get up at 7:30 to when they go to bed at 11:00. So we'll see how this whole blogging thing works out...

This afternoon I got the list of the ten girls who will be living on my hall for the first three weeks. The first thing I noticed was that they were all born in the nineties, which made me feel sort of old. But other than that, getting the list made me really eager to meet them and get started with the whole bonding and facilitating social interactions thing. The students live with their (same sex) classmates, and there are two classes of girls living on my hall: Introduction to Biomedical Science and Introduction to Neuroscience. I think they try to assign the classes to RAs with similar majors, but apparently it doesn't always work out because the male RA for the neuroscience class is an art major. Go figure. I'm really excited because this means I'll have some of the nerdiest nerds at nerd camp, which is exactly what I wanted. And maybe one day I'll be able to take a little credit for one of them growing up to be an MIT Course 9er! Well, assuming that's something to be proud of, that is.

Anyways, I have to come up with four activity plans and make "door decs" for all my girls before we start again tomorrow at 7:30, so I think that's it for blogging tonight. I think I'm going to go with a Mad Scientist theme when I decorate the hall, and if it works out maybe I'll post some pictures!