Into the Woods

I’ve always enjoyed doing volunteer work with kids; and I’m not ashamed to admit why I like it.  It’s the grandparent role – you get the smiles and the adventure and the fun, and somebody else gets the tears and the muddy shoes and the trips to the bathroom.

This is my twelfth fall as a volunteer teacher at Imago, an outdoor education center on our side of town.  Imago has 16 acres of woods and trails in an urban neighborhood where it offers activities and programs related to nature and ecology for adults and kids.  My work has been with school field trips and I’ve been on hand every fall and spring since 1998.  (I did a few summers but it was muggy and buggy, there were no teachers to focus the kids’ attention and if I heard “I need a drink of water” one more time, I would have landed the lead role in “Murder at the Nature Center.”)

In the beginning, I learned the curriculum for and taught all of Imago’s classes - Animal Habitat, Insects, Plants, Native American Life and Caretakers (ecology and recycling.)  I absorbed a lot – of course, I was younger and had more fully-functioning memory cells at that time.  Each class involves hands-on activities like making a human food pyramid or simulating plant pollination with tennis balls or looking under rocks for critters.  My favorite activity  was the Web of Life, where each kid was a different plant or animal; and my job was to connect them all together in a giant yarn web, which made a big impression as long as I didn’t get tangled up in the middle like some big, dumb fly.

Games are another important feature of Imago classes.  As a veteran of the boys’ birthday parties, I am dynamite at running kids’ games efficiently and smoothly.  I know all the do’s and don’ts by heart.  One: Make sure there are no loopholes in the rules or some future attorney will nail you.  Two: Don’t give anybody a second turn unless EVERYBODY gets a second turn.  Three: If you make the games too competitive, you’re headed for interminable squabbles over score keeping and fairness.  Actually, at Imago, the competition problems didn’t come from the kids. When I ran into trouble, it was because some Dad got mixed up and thought he was coaching the U.S. Olympic team, instead of chaperoning a first grade outing.

Every class also includes a hike.  For some kids, walking through even a very small woods is a very big, exciting adventure.  For others, hiking is an acceptable way to let off steam and general antsy-ness.  And, for a few Type A’s, it’s a struggle for dominance.  If I had a quarter for every time my heel got stepped on by a boy or a girl jockeying for a place at the head of the line, I could buy my own nature center.  Still, the hikes are always fun plus being good time fillers – at least they have been since I learned the trail system and stopped running into the same dead end like some dense lab rat.

While I took my turn teaching all of the classes, the Native American Life class was always my best.  A few years ago, I realized that I was out of my depth in teaching the other programs.  Sure, I know more about plants than the average pre-schooler and I can reliably tell a tree from a bush or a flower.  Only after I remembered the hint, "pistil-packin' mama," could I keep the names for male and female plant parts straight.  The grade-school program, however, also requires me to do things like actually identifying specific trees and leaves and explaining photosynthesis.  Whoa, hoss! I thought the point of passing high school biology was to never have to think a photosynthetic thought again! I had to keep a vague, low profile when it came to recognizing most insects. The last straw was when a kindergartner told me what I had confidently identified as a butterfly was, in fact, a moth.  That was my exit cue.

I explained to the Director that you can teach an old dog new tricks but she doesn’t do them all that well.  Even though he was a twenty-something and at the top of his game in the short-term memory department, he was very understanding.  After all, I volunteer at Imago to have fun, not to bring on anxiety attacks. So, I got an honorable discharge from everything except Native American Life. 

That works out great.  Since I wrote the lesson, it’s easy to remember what I’m supposed to say about the wigwam, the hunting artifacts and the garden.  I always make sure there’s time for my class to grind corn, to scrape hair off of a deer hide and to have their faces painted.  I love the kids’ reaction when I show them a coyote-tooth bracelet or a swatch of buffalo skin. It’s fun to tell them gross but cool stuff like how Native Americans softened deer hides (by rubbing them with deer brains) or how they cleaned out a turtle shell  (by letting ants eat the turtle out.)   I can relax, confident that, now, I know all the answers, and just about all the question too.

Of course, when you work with people, there are still some surprises, not all of them good.  Once I was leading a hike when a kid stepped in a deep, muddy hole and pulled out just his bare foot. Another time, someone vandalized Imago’s storage area and stole the most awesome artifact ever – the Ka-Bonger (not its official name, of course, but what else would you call a thick, deerskin-wrapped stick with a pouch containing a big rock attached at the end, especially if you grew up watching QuickDraw McGraw cartoons.)  Occasionally there is a kid who is wild or disruptive or whiny or prissy.  After raising two boys, dealing with wild and disruptive is actually a slam-dunk. Whiny and prissy is more of a challenge, and I ruthlessly enforce a ban on shrieking at the sight of animal skins.  I’ve also been dismayed to find that a few parent chaperones can’t break the Siamese twin bond with their cell phones, even on a field trip.  Whatever.  A class lasts 3 ½ hours max, which is another good thing because, as I get older, I need a longer and longer nap to recover afterward.

When I got the email with this fall’s teaching schedule, I signed up for yet another season of Native American Life.  I’m looking forward to seeing the autumn sunlight and the changing leaves in Imago’s 16 acres.  I’m looking forward to working with helpful parents and enthusiastic teachers, some of whom I’ve seen every fall for 12 years.  And, I’m especially looking forward to helping lots of curious, imaginative kids to see the ghosts of Shawnees hiding in Imago’s tiny woods and to picture themselves hunting or sleeping in a wigwam.  I get to luxuriate in kid chatter, kid excitement and kid laughter without scrambling anyone’s eggs, checking anyone’s homework, or shampooing anyone’s hair – such a deal!