Team Building

Since it's full term and school is off for a couple of weeks, the good folks at ICSS took all the volunteer teachers away on a team building event thingy. Or at least "team building" was the excuse we all told ourselves in order to have a bit of a social gathering. It turned out to be pretty fun, and for a select few of us, pretty wet too.

Lambourne End was the venue, a kind of farm-cum-outdoor centre seemingly built for corporate events of this type. All in all, we had around thirty people (some whom I'm certain I've not even seen at ICSS. Hmm), so the first thing to do was to split ourselves up into three groups, one of which were to be put through the watery assault course. Guess what group I was in?

It was the usual stuff that some of you may have seen already. We were greeted by a long and narrow pond with various ways of getting across it; rope bridges, rope swings, tires, wires, that sort of stuff. The idea was to use teamwork and mutual encouragement to get ourselves across each safely, although I must admit some of us might have enjoyed others failing (and so plunging into quite scummy water) a bit too much. I'm sure some of you will be delighted to know I completed the exercise completely dry.

After the morning's physical session was over, we settled down for a bit of lunch (mmm, Naan Kebab) and a pep talk by some of the more senior members about what ICSS is and how we're each doing a good job by volunteering. We're professional role models, apparently. Cough.

After that, we ended on a game of "Simon Says", a game I've not played since primary school. I was asked to be Simon, and I must confess that I found it a harder job than I thought, especially when the candidates were reduced to the few hard core people who seemed to be taking the game a bit too seriously (although I would have probably been the same had I been playing). After that, we had cake.

So yeh, a nice day of fun and games and an excuse for adult teacher types to act like children, and once again it makes me realise exactly how normally my own teachers must have acted behind the scenes. As for us, I'll never get over how immature we behave when the situation calls for it, but then if it means we come out a closer, more effective, group because of it, I don't think that there's any reason to complain either.