Guide School Day 2: Quiz, Coordination Games, Leader Presentations, and PREPARE

Last night we had our second 3-hour classroom session of guide school.

We started out with a nice quiz on our readings from our text book, Outdoor Leadership.  Everyone seemed like they performed pretty poorly.  I had read the PREPARE chapter and read most of the two leadership chapters, and I even struggled with some of the questions.  I think the point of the quiz was to get us to take our future homework assignments a bit more seriously.

Then we played a few coordination games in which we had to remember who we were throwing objects to and how we were catching object from, even when the ordering was mixed up.  It was an interesting, quick exercise that made us all work together.

Then we sat down for the leadership presentations, which really shouldn't have taken long.  The assignment was to prepare a 3 minute presentation on a leader or mentor - and you had to bring a visual aid.  I volunteered to go first.  I presented on Heather, who I see as a great role model.  I picked leadership aspects in Heather to match each letter of her name and spoke shortly about how she exemplifies each aspect.  H is for 'heart of a servant', as Heather puts others first.  E is for 'environmental', since Heather cares for the environment (I gave her Borrow Earth Responsibly motto as an example).  A is for 'all in', since Heather puts everything she has into whatever she is doing.  T is for trail-ready, since Heather took me on my first backpacking trip and happily showed me how to filter water on a later trip.  H is for 'hard worker', but I guess it also could have been for 'healthy'.  E is for 'enjoys life' as Heather always seems to be enjoying life to the fullest whether we are volunteering, relaxing, or hiking.  R is for 'real' because Heather is a real, authentic person and she inspires this in me when I'm around her.

My presentation went well, despite the fact that I spent very little time preparing.  I passed around a picture of Heather, JT, and I backpacking at Lost Maples and wrote the letters of her name on the whiteboard.  The positive comments I received where: my talk was energetic and articulate, my passion showed through as well as the effect she has had on me, and they liked the acronym.  The constructive criticism comments I received were: I could have included more stories and I seemed a bit nervous.

Atleast half of the rest of the group went over time, with multiple people taking more than double the allocated 3 minutes.  Overall the presentations were interesting though, and some of them really helped us get to know our fellow guide school members.  A few people really opened up through the presentation, which was great to see.

For the last hour or so we discussed PREPARE, how to plan a trip, and how to conduct a pre-trip meeting.  P is for participants (who is on your trip?  what are their abilities and experience?), R is for resources (gear, budgets), E is for equipment (inform participants of what to wear, what types of group gear, personal gear, kitchen gear, and technical gear are needed?), P is for plan (itinerary and time control), A is for access (how is proper access obtained?), R is for rationing (menu, food buy, food pack), and E is for emergency plan (what are the protocols?).

At the end, we were broken up into four groups.  These four groups will present their pre-trip talks and trip plans for a weekend trip that they design in the next classroom session.  I'll be in Peru though, so I'll be missing out on this exercise.

We also received three types of rope at the end of the session.  We have 8 knots that we are supposed to learn: water knot, bowline, figure 8 follow through, figure 8 on a bite, normal figure 8, double fisherman's, prussik hitch, and trucker hitch.  I started working on four of the knots today, and found that it is actually pretty fun!  Animated Knots is really great for learning knots.