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Make a Difference with Camp Augusta

Summer Camp work with community living, progressive behavior management styles, the craziest games you'll ever play and children that will remember you forever…

Camp Augusta is different than most camps because we operate on a structure of flat hierarchy, consensus and intention with every action. We don’t believe in punishment, reward or guilt – we choose instead to see the hearts of our campers and connect with their needs. We also have many activities that you are unlikely to find at other camps, like: aerial silks, sword fighting, whips, fire spinning, high and low ropes, archery and horseback riding to name a few.

People can have a job, a career, or a calling. Camp Augusta is looking for folks who have a calling. Work, play, learn, struggle and grow in a vibrant community this summer facilitating the growth of children, yourself and others in the community.

We are a residential summer camp located in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Northern California. We have six sessions during our season, 3 one week and 3 two week, with 90 campers (aged 8-16) each session. Our staff training begins on May 17th, and the main season runs through August 13th.

We aim to give children the experience of living without many of the modern conveniences that are present in their everyday lives. They get the chance to experience living in an open-air cabin without electricity. There are no televisions or stereos so they make their own music. There is a great deal of information on our website regarding the philosophy of camp and the activities we offer. If you are interested in Camp Augusta, please look those over carefully.

All of our staff must be at least 19 years of age.

Our website, CampAugusta.org, has descriptions of all available positions under the "staff" heading. We have openings for counselors, kitchen, and a number of leadership positions. When you are ready, go to the "Staff Application" page and follow the instructions for submitting an application.

Hope to hear from you soon!

Namaste

applications@campaugusta.org

530-265-3702 (give us a call and say hello!)

 

 

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Memorable Teaching

Memorable Teaching, By Lynn Stoddard

“People cannot learn by having information pressed into their brains. Knowledge has to be (pulled) into the brain, not pushed in. First, one must create a state of mind that craves knowledge, interest and wonder. You can teach only by creating an urge to know.”

The author of these words, Victor Weisskopf, was a world renowned Jewish scientist who escaped from Nazi Germany and helped develop the atomic bomb. He was known as a “memorable teacher.” He encouraged his physics students to ask questions by saying, “There is no such thing as a stupid question.” Weisskopf taught that it is by the use of questions that students pull information into their brains. He taught by creating an “urge to know.”

What is the difference between information that is pressed into a student’s brain and information that is pulled in? Is there a difference between required learning and self-chosen learning? Plato said, “Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.”

Memorable teaching, in its purist form, may be the act of stimulating and enlarging something we were all born with — curiosity. This is reinforced by Christ’s words in the Bible, “Ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you.” We can interpret “ask,” “seek,” and “knock” as ascending levels of the “urge to know.”

What happens if students are taught math and reading, before they have a desire to know?  According to research done by Peter Gray of Boston College and others, too early academic training results in long term intellectual and psychological damage.

Early failure experiences result in young children hating school and losing confidence in their ability to learn, a precursor for many to later drop out and become burdens to society — in and out of prison. Schools that are based on pressing a standardized curriculum into student’s minds may also be the root cause of becoming a loner, bullying and violence to others.

In later school years, required, assigned learning becomes shallow and temporary as students learn information to pass tests and discard it soon thereafter. It is becoming more and more evident that self-chosen knowledge, the kind that is “pulled in,” is the only kind that is deep and enduring.

Ever since the federal government started to take over public education and impose a curriculum to be pressed into student’s heads, it has become increasingly difficult for teachers to cultivate an “urge to know” and encourage students to ask questions. Memorable teaching, the kind that makes a positive difference in people’s lives, is rare.

If you are a concerned parent, legislator, school board member, teacher, administrator or student, ask for your freedom, as specified by the 10th Amendment, to develop a local school system that encourages and supports teachers to be the great, memorable people they want to be. You can also work at transforming yourself into a great teacher, holding up examples like Weisskopf, Einstein or Christ, the most memorable of them all. In so doing, you will make a difference in the lives of others and become memorable to them.

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First Workshops Approved for the 2016 AERO Conference!

Don Berg – Schools of Conscience

We Are NOT Robots! A Respectful Paradigm for Learning

The dominant paradigm of learning as content delivery has been thoroughly critiqued and discredited, but an equally compelling alternative paradigm based in both the behavioral and cognitive sciences has not arisen. Workshop presenter Don Berg, an education psychologist and author, will share with you a new synthesis of the current science on learning and motivation that can better guide both educational policy and practice. Let’s discuss whether or not it is sufficiently compelling to become a new paradigm.

 

Josette Luvmour, PhD – Summa Institute

Working with our students families: What every Holistic Educator needs to know

All children come with parents—all parents are part of their child’s education. The future of teacher training for Holistic Educators must include preparation about how to work with parents. We will discuss the importance of collaboration with our students’ families that is mutually respectful. Our students are continually adapting to the relationships and communications among primary caregivers. When educators, parents, and students are on the same page, a synergy emerges that allows for an explosion of learning. These key relationships have a large effect on children’s educational experiences. Moreover, parent and child grow together. With knowledge attention to attuned relationships with the child’s family, Holistic Educators can create educational environments that match our student’s needs Academic excellence results. We will at look rejuvenating experiences in teacher/family interactions because this partnership is the crucible of our student’s well-being and happiness.

 

Lindie Keaton – Antioch School

A Year in the Life of a Forest Kindergarten

Come hear about the adventures and misadventures of the first year of a Forest Kindergarten. Share your own ideas and get new ideas from others about how children benefit from spending time with nature and how adults can help increase children's opportunities to be outside.

 

Samantha Matalone Cook – Curiosity Hacked

Hacking the Future: Creating a Learner Centered Education

 

Join Samantha Cook, Founder and ED of Curiosity Hacked, learning about creating/supporting a more learner-centered educational environment through mentorship, hands-on making, and hacking to integrate skill building into new or existing schools. Dive into how a hackerspace became a catalyst for self-determining and self-directed learning through a variety of programs designed to meet different needs. See concrete examples of how hard and soft skills, low tech and high tech projects, and leveraging local and global community can create an environment of possibility. Participants will be gaining new skills, work with a variety of materials, and discuss relevant ideas and examples to enhance their own visions as well as those of their students. Time will be given for personal and site specific ideas.

 

Barbarah Nicoll – Ubuntu Learning

This Body of Knowledge

In this workshop we will explore our self knowledge through body mapping, responding to guided activities to discover and map on our own body outline what we know of ourselves and what is important to us. Participants will be guided through an interactive and artistic experience that will include somatic awareness, working with the wisdom of the 4 directions (which includes life phases, seasons and inclinations) body mapping and group poetry writing. These activities are suited for youth (14 to 19), and of course adults of all ages. These activities invite participants to employ their “soft will”, a way of looking inward with courage to see oneself, in contrast to the “hard will” that is often engaged when one is given a task to fulfill, often with an overt or hidden requirement to please an authority figure. This holistic and artistic engagement includes improvisation, somatic awareness (coming to know our own bodies as a source of knowledge), expressive arts, biography questions, journaling and group poetry. This workshop is fully interactive and invitational.

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The Ten Worst Things That Happen In School

 

1. Sometimes you have to get up when it's still dark.

Research has shown that children generally learn better when they start school later.1

2. Most schools dispense curriculum from the top down, from distant sources.

Children learn best when the approach is learner-centered, based on their interest.

3. Students are forced to stay in classrooms and are not allowed to leave.

Democratic and progressive schools have found that children are happier and learn better when they are free to come and go.

4. Children in most schools are forced to sit in rows of desks and not move around.

Research shows that it is unhealthy for children to not move around, and is especially painful for kinesthetic learners.2

5. In most schools learning takes place in rigid periods, governed by bells.

Research has shown that children need to learn according to their own rhythms, working on projects until they are finished.3

6. In most schools bullying is rampant and there is no effective mechanism to control it. 

There is almost no bullying in democratic schools, and if there is a problem it can be brought up in a democratic meeting where students can give each side of a conflict and all participants enforce the decisions.4

7. In most schools, irrelevant homework is assigned, which students are forced to do at home and turn in at school.

If students are following their own interests, homework is not necessary. If children are natural learners, assigning them to study information not of interest only serves to extinguish that natural ability to learn.

8. In most schools children are segregated into classes of students who are their exact age.

This is "socialization" to a bizarre environment they will never experience in their life after school. Children learn best in mixed age groups in which they can collaborate with children of different ages and backgrounds.5

9. In most schools children are forced to compete for grades in every subject.

Grades have been shown to be a false motivator, based on someone else's idea of what they should be learning, rather than their own intrinsic interest.6

10. In most schools students are forced to take many hours of standardized tests, often without ever knowing whether their answers were right or wrong.

Teaching to tests pushes students in exactly the wrong direction. They should only be given at a student's request, with the results known immediately, and not ever as a judgment of ability. 

 

If many of these things describe situations in your school, it's time to look for another school, or to consider homeschooling. 

 

 
 
 
 
Safe learning environment: Research has documented a remarkable lack of violence, vandalism, and disruptive behavior in schools of choice. Students and families consistently report feeling both physically and emotionally safe to participate and learn.