Nerd camp
Okay so maybe blogs are harder to maintain than I originally thought. Or, after a period of no posting, it’s hard to get back into it. I guess the same applies with everything else.
I should have posted on this when it was actually happening in January but never got around to it - or never could be bothered. The ASO biology olympiad program was on again in Canberra at ANU. This year we had 20 kids and 10 staff, more than enough to go around. The kids were a nice bunch to teach, nowhere near as crazy as the bunch the previous year - which can be a good and bad thing.
Being the fourth year I’ve been back as a tutor, you kind of get used to the general running of things. Not to say that this year was without its surprises though but they’re too sensitive to post to the world. Even though the scholars this year were more quiet than previous years (which was great!) and apparently more studious, extraneous events still took their toll on everyone and by the end of it we were pretty drained. I guess this draining happens every year anyway - it’s what you get for spending 3 intense weeks living and doing stuff together, running on a formal 9am-9pm schedule with a few hours tacked to each end. But it’s good fun.
Notable events include:
- Tetrinet (the absolute best game for building staff rapport)
- Starcraft (which Maria and I played quite a bit of once she bought it from EB at Civic)
- Turkish pizza (gotta love that oil)
- Concrete (Ruby’s ice cream, weird but yum flavours!)
- Paddle boating (and forming a 4-kayak, 3-paddleboat armarda on Lake Burley Griffith)
- Weird staff videos (especially Guang’s ones - he promised to upload them to Google video)
- Balloon animals in liquid nitrogen (Josh makes physics fun)
- Mafia (a competition of who can talk the loudest and finger-point the most effectively)
- Staff pool (with Guang and Vince playing for massages, eww)
- The last staff night (which we will never speak of again)
- Taking pictures of all these things (videos too, but they’re just disturbing)
Of course we did a bit of teaching amongst all the other stuff too.
In all it was a great but tiring 3 weeks which I’m sure all the staff (and maybe even the returning scholars) look forward to every year. Being able to learn and teach biology in such a friendly and fun environment is fantastic. Thanks to the scholars for being a pleasure to teach and the staff, as always, for so much fun.