I don’t talk enough about my outdoors adventures here – actually, the truth is I don’t have enough outdoors adventures. In 2019 I’m going to have more of them, I promise.
You may or may not know that I have an archery qualification and more recently, a fencing qualification and recently the opportunity came up to make more use of them.
I spent a day the other week at an outdoor education centre. It was a selection day – a long interview for an outdoors instructor job. It’s not a change in career, I’d still be spending my weekdays researching and running reports but they wanted casual instructors and that sort of thing would fit nicely into my spare days.
I was a little bewildered by the fact that two of the five candidates to attend this selection day were already working as outdoors instructors and a third was in the process of moving from general assistant to instructor.
The morning featured a written test, which three of us passed – not the two who were already instructors, interestingly. You can download the test here if you’re interested but then don’t read my next paragraph before taking it.
We were given three minutes. It started with “read everything before doing anything”, went through a variety of small tasks like “draw five squares in the corner”, “circle [x] word in Q[y]”. “shout your name out loud”, “draw circles around your five squares” etc and finished with “When you’ve read everything, only do Q1 & Q2.”
We had an entirely unnecessary site tour – the other three live there and the two of us who don’t have visited regularly enough to have seen every corner, camped in most fields and tried out most of the activities.
The rest of the morning was occupied in team games and activities. Finding and bursting balloons blindfolded was fun, if you don’t mind looking like an idiot crawling around on the floor with your arms outswept (as it happens, I don’t). As for Lego Chinese whispers, I’m doing that with my Rangers. We had a random shape built and had to pass on instructions for reconstructing it through five people into a different room. Oh, of course, the one we managed to build looked nothing like the original but we got the base and we got the red and orange pieces in the right places.
After a break, came the emergency salad. We were supposed to be doing our group tasks but the senior instructor came in and I quote:
Something’s come up. Bit of an emergency situation. It happens all the time in a place like this. We need all bodies for a few minutes. There are some salads that need carrying.
They were hosting a corporate away day in one of the outbuildings and while the chef could easily handle catering it, getting the food across the site to the building was another matter. So the cavalry marched into the kitchen and took two trolleys of salad and buffet food over, which involved carrying the entire trolley over the gravel path leading up the front door, plus several platters of hot food fresh from the oven – sausage rolls, samosas, something that looked like potato shapes etc, hot enough on the metal platters that you had to carry it on your jacketed arms rather than with your hands.
Then we did the group tasks. These we’d been requested in advance – run a game or activity lasting 5-10 minutes for 3-10 people, with a purpose. The purpose was the difficult bit. I can run a short activity for 3-20 people on a moment’s notice, especially with access to the Brownie cupboard but the purpose tripped me up and eventually I settled for a game one of my Rangers suggested, from the Guides’ new Unit Meeting Activity packs, an ice-breaking name-learning game. I think the others had less purpose and some of them were more suited to kids than adults but the nature of outdoor education is that it’s usually about kids.
After lunch we went and tried out the high ropes. I’m ok with belaying – I was a caver in a past life and that involves some similar rope techniques – but high ropes is a little beyond me. I can climb a pole using metal staples, no problem. Leaping off and grabbing a trapeze – problem. Even with one of the already-instructors calling from below “You’re tall enough that you can reach it if you just lean forwards” – quite the novelty, being told I’m tall enough. At 5’5″, I’m not exactly tiny but I was far and away the shortest of the group and I spent my caving days in the company of boys 6’+ so I’m used to not being tall enough to climb things.
But trapeze went well compared to the others. Jacob’s ladder, which involves climbing a dangling ladder made out of logs spaced four feet apart. With help from above and below, I finally made it onto the second rung, arms wrapped around the third. The gladiator challenge went even worse. The first part consisted of a rope ladder, except that the rungs were great big chunks of wood and it dangled. That in itself was no problem. First ever bit of caving training was How To Climb An Electron Ladder and How To Trust Your Lifeliner – an electron ladder being a dangling ladder made of wire. You wrap your arms around it and hold on from the wrong side which means it keeps your body close, which stops it swinging. That technique didn’t work on this ladder. Neither did climbing one foot from the front and one from behind. I got onto the second rung for a moment and then took another twenty or so attempts to repeat that feat.
And finally, there was the formal interview. I was a little bit terrified of this but they assured me this was just the bit HR was making them do. Seven pages of questions ranging from “tell us about your career” to “tell us how your values match up to ours”. I tried not to take it too seriously. We finished with arranging how we’d match their needs with my availability, who’s going to call who and then they said “Ok, we’ll be in touch in the next week” which was not quite what I’d expected.
I’m trying to tell myself they’re not trying to narrow it down to one successful candidate for that one job. They’re trying to expand their pool of instructors, of people they can call on when too many groups book in, especially over the summer. They only have one fencing instructor at the moment and you can always do with more archery instructors and yes, I did badly at the high ropes but I’m not trained or qualified in that and never claimed to be (although they will train and qualify me if I want – and canoeing. But not minibus).
So, update a week and a day later. I got the job. Training and assessment starts in April.