"Going on camp is not our obligation"

Of all the mistakes I've made in my maternal journey, of which there are many and varied, there has also been a great success: enrolling my children in the after-school club. It's the town's after-school club, called Globus Roig, and like all after-school clubs, they educate in leisure and, above all, they educate in something enormous: that the youngest have adolescents as role models who act as monitors, who play with them and take them on camps in exchange for nothing. Let's return to this concept so we don't overlook it. In. Exchange. For. Nothing. It is the maximum generosity in a world where adolescents have a reputation for not looking up from their phones and living in an infinite scroll without their own criteria. We value this refuge of young people who have decided to mortgage all their weekends and their holidays to be with our children. this refuge of young people who have decided to mortgage all their weekends and their holidays to be with our children.

I was fortunate that my eldest son was a "child" at the after-school club until he was eighteen (it still amazes me that a group of second-year high school students went to the after-school club every Saturday) and now he is a monitor, also known as a "moni

". You know that I am a teacher and you are all aware that there is a lot of preparation and report writing that we do at home. Well, I didn't imagine that being a monitor would be the same and involve so much dedication outside the after-school club. Here I was naive, I knew that what the monitors did was generous but I never thought it was so much. monis but I never thought it was so much.

They don't stop having meetings, online meetings, organizing committees and preparing all the games. You can't even imagine the logistics and supplies they had to deploy to go on camp. They dedicate so much time to it that sometimes I'm tempted to say something but I keep quiet because it's for their own good. No, now that I think about it, it's not just for their own good. It's to do good for others. And there's nothing better than giving yourself to others in a world where there's so much talk about the self, about "self-help" books and about "me time".

Also, all my respect to the families who trust in "monis" like my son, who leaves dressed in his tracksuit, looking sleepy, loaded like a mule and with everything ready to spend five days in charge of a group of minors. In a context of helicopter parents and an excess of information in sterile WhatsApp groups, trusting a group of young people who ask you for "clothes to get dirty" and "a flashlight" represents one of the most important challenges of parenting: knowing when to let go.

The master 'pack'

I perfectly understand that many teachers have said no to going on school trips. On the one hand, I think children need this learning and that it is extremely important to help them spread their wings instead of staying in the nest. On the other hand, the enormous responsibility and tiredness that leaving home entails for us is not sufficiently valued. And I'm not just referring to economic terms. It's as if in the teacher's pack it's already taken for granted that going on school trips is our obligation. And it's not.

Everything has happened to me during end-of-year trips: nighttime fevers, lost backpacks with all the documentation, students grumbling because they are tired, students feeling homesick at night. And let's not forget that I teach secondary school and have older students. Every year I think: never again. And every year I go back because school trips and journeys with school leave such a brutal memory that I think it's worth maintaining. You may not remember the holidays you took 10 years ago, but... the trips with school? Of those, you even know who you shared a room with and the clothes you wore. School trips are a giant learning experience and I cannot be more grateful to all those counselors from the summer camps who remain enthusiastic and accept returning tired, dirty, with mismatched socks, and with an honest smile on their faces.

My son went as a child to be a counselor. And I hope this path allows him to continue growing, in all senses.