Before Language Camp B by Yuanyi Tan

      It was actually not my first time getting involved in a language camp, but it was absolutely a new experience to get my hands dirty helping in organizing one. Also, before this, I was only assigned to facilitate either primary students or tertiary students (ELCW camp). Dealing with secondary students in a language camp was something that I had no practical idea about. Prior to Language Camp B, I actually imagined the possibility of having to handle a bunch of teenagers who are in their rebellious phase. What if they refuse to cooperate and think whatever I am doing is a waste of time or worse, childish? But luckily, that doesn’t happen at all.

       As far as I can recall, we had our first meeting right after Mr. Ghazali’s class where he informed us the particulars of the language camp that we are going to be in charge of. In that meeting, we discussed and appointed the committee members for the sake of systematic task delegation. From that point onwards, I was aware that I would be playing the role as a facilitator, of which I was happy about. After that, our director created a Facebook group to keep everyone updated with the camp’s progress and whatnots.

       Not long later, we met for the second time. In that meeting, we elected the game masters for every game. Three friends of mine and I volunteered to look after Tandem Writing. After dismissal, we straight away discussed the details of the game and quickly decided that we would only need around 200 A4 papers for the game. The materials were prepared by Language Academy but to play safe, we agreed on bringing 40 extra papers (10 for each) on the actual day. When it came to document preparation, we realized that the previous group provided themes for students to conduct this writing game. We mutually reckoned that would the better way of doing it as it would provide constructive directions for students on what to write. Therefore, we similarly fixed 3 themes which include love story, ghost story and animal story (a new theme). After confirming all the details, I was responsible for typing and printing the facilitator’s game note (consisting of Tandem Writing’s procedures and time allocation) for everyone.

        In our last meeting, all the game masters gave briefing about the rules, regulations and variations of respective games. Through the meeting, we managed to grasp the overall idea of the camp more confidently because those games had then been steadily stored in our pockets.

         A Chinese idiom has its say that “one minute of performance on stage needs ten years of practice off stage “. To a certain extent, it does reflect the efforts that we have made in a week’s time to succeed a one-day language camp. I have learnt that rigorous, careful and no-hard-feeling teamwork is crucial towards building victory in every attempt that we are making.