High Ropes

I spent the first part of this week with B's 5th grade class at the Audubon Center of the North Woods.  There were 52 kids, divided into four groups.  Over the course of three days they rotated through four different classes.  Each class lasted three hours and involved a lot of outdoor time.  Each night there was a program that the entire group attended.  All in all, I'd say it was a fairly positive experience for the kids in the group I was with.

I think my favorite class was the first one we did, high ropes.  In this class, you climb a pole up to a platform 20 feet in the air.  Then you clip a harness to an overhead cable and make your way across some sort of bridge or cable to another platform on a pole about 20 feet away.  The course consists of a number of these poles, each with a different type of crossing to get to it.

At the second platform, you can choose to either continue on through the long course or take a relatively simple path to the finish point.  As an adult helper, I was stationed at this platform.  My main job was to make sure the kids safely transferred their clips from one overhead cable to the next as they entered and left a platform.  My other job was to try to convince as many as possible to take the long route.  I loved this part.

I loved the fact that each kid, no matter how shy, was forced to talk to me in order to get their clips moved.  Many of them didn't know me well and probably would never have spoken to me otherwise.  Now, here they were, stuck on a platform 20 feet in the air with some annoying grownup who kept talking to them.  Hey, the course is about challenging yourself and getting outside your comfort zone.  For some kids, it was the height for others I think it might have been me.

I'm happy to say that most of the kids took the long route.  It wasn't too hard to get them to continue, they just needed a little push usually.  I told them that I found the section they'd just finished to be the toughest one and the rest of the course would probably be easy for them (of course, at that point I hadn't actually done the other sections yet).  If they were still hesitant, I employed a more powerful force: peer pressure - I'd point out friends who were currently on the long course or who had just finished.  That usually did the trick.

Of course, there were a few kids who were really scared to be up there.  For them, just climbing to the top of the starting platform was a major victory.  They were easy to spot and when they got to my platform I didn't push them too hard to go on.  They had already challenged themselves more than some of the kids who did the long course.

I'm glad we did that class first and I'm glad I chose to be on that platform.  It gave me an opportunity to meet and chat with each student in the group.  I think this made the subsequent classes and our time at the center easier because we knew each other just a little bit better.