Returned from Jamaica

Hello! I hope that everyone is doing well. It's been a while since the last blog update and there's good reason for that. I've been in Jamaica for the last two and a half weeks on a medical mission. If you want more information you can just follow the link on the right labelled [ the clean slate ] as I will be posting about the trip over the next couple of weeks.

While I was there – I had the opportunity to lead the missions team in several team building activities. The dynamics of the group were large. The youngest in the group being just 18 – ranging to the oldest being in their 70s. Wowzers. Initially when I volunteered for the task I was imagining a group a little closer in age and a little more tolerant of “games”. I don't know why it threw me so much. It's not like I haven't worked with a group with a large age gap before – I do it all the time at Teacher Conventions but this group seemed different. Especially when my parents were part of the group. It was just an added dynamic that set me back a bit.

But I pressed on. Two of the activities that I did were The Least to the Greatest that we've covered here and the regular debrief can be found here. However – a couple things happened that I found particularly interesting. I'll cover the differences today and cover the second activity later this week.

This being the first activity that I had done with the group and likely the first time that the majority of the group had ever experienced a team building exercise – I prefaced the whole thing by introducing myself and explaining that I have some pretty unorthodox ways of approaching meetings and team building. I handed a card out to everyone and gave the instructions. The entire activity must have only taken about 45 seconds to complete. No one even communicated about how they should order themselves. The answer to the group must have seemed obvious because no one talked about it. Once they finished I had everyone sit back down. I made a comment about how that might have been one of the fastest completions that I've ever seen. One of the older members responded to that by saying, “That's because we're not kids”. Funny – I think I even detected a superior tone in the comment as if kids were just not as good as adults or that the solution is just not obvious to younger participants.

They couldn't be more wrong. As previously covered in the debrief – the answer only makes sense in context to which you're focusing. The card that is the least in Crib is not the same as Hearts or Old Maid. The comment stuck with me though. It highlights a very prominent difference between youth and adults. Divergent Thinking. But I'm not going to get into that right now. What I'm actually going to do is leave you with a very compelling video that is a MUST see. Then I'll be back tomorrow with some more thoughts on the matter (which were actually all written down and then my browser decided to do updates without asking me if I wanted to keep my draft...).

See you tomorrow!