One of the big things in my life is Girlguiding. I’ve been a volunteer for eleven and a half years now. Well, no, I’ve been an adult leader for eleven and a half years now. I was an occasional unit helper while I was away at university and I was a Young Leader for a few years before that and a Brownie Helper before that, a position that was once called Pack Leader, which is confusing when that person is actually at the very bottom of the leadership hierarchy. I’ve been a volunteer for nearly twenty years by now in various capacities.
It means I get to do fun things like putting out tables and chairs, unit accounts, badge admin, planning meetings, ad-hoc planning when I discover at the last minute that no one’s got anything planned for tonight or that I haven’t planned anything for tonight. It also means I get to do genuinely fun stuff like take my Rangers to winter survival camp or my Guides to our unit summer camp or my Brownies to national fun days. Through Girlguiding I’ve got my archery instructor award and my fencing coach qualification. I’ve talked about all that before, many times and it’s now all going under the umbrella category of “Inspiring kids” because I get to introduce my kids to adventure and the outdoors and all that good stuff.
Today is a follow-up on my fencing qualification because it’s taken this long to teach my first sessions. I was nervous because I’m not very familiar with fencing, I’ve not really done it before and a six hour course isn’t much to go from never-done-it-before to teaching-it. A week before my first lesson I picked up a big bag of swords – and when I say big, I mean that it’s the size of the entire back seat of my car. It contains six orange plastic swords and six green ones, six white tabards and six black ones plus twelve face masks. It’s a huge bag but it’s not particularly heavy, it’s just a really awkward shape and size to carry. It gets stuck in doorways. I also spent a week reading lesson plans and trying to piece together my own.
My first lesson, with my Brownies, went badly. Not because it was a first lesson or because I’d planned it badly but because an hour before it began, I suddenly got a message that Brown Owl was going to be late, Tawny wasn’t coming at all and our usual parent extra-pair-of-hands couldn’t make it. Instead of teaching two groups of eight for 40ish minutes each, I was going to have to teach 16 kids for nearly an hour and a half with only twelve swords. It turns out getting children in and out of tabards and helmets every ten minutes is a miserable task and it breaks up the flow of learning to poke each other with swords.
Guides the next night went brilliantly. The Guide leaders took half the group away and I taught eleven or twelve at a time. They got on reasonably well with the footwork and the sword-waving, there was more back-and-forth than side-to-side and most importantly, there was a lot of giggling. I’m not here to make Olympic fencers out of them. Most will never touch a sword again. But they’ve had a go at a new activity and had a fun session and that’s what I’m there for.
The third session was with the other Guides at the other end of the district. That one wasn’t great, principally because they’ve got two girls who’ve reached the age when they just want to be giggly and disruptive and not do what they’re told. They’re not bad girls – these are the Guides I used to run, so I know them reasonably well – and they didn’t ruin the lesson exactly but they made it more difficult. Oh – we ran out of activities after an hour so I recalled a game we played many years ago when I had one of my very few fencing lessons and we had something of a pirate melee.
I’ve been advertising myself around the district and hope to get two or three more sessions booked in the next few months, not to mention my own Rangers. I’ve more or less settled my lesson, I have a good forty-minute session ready to go and I can extend it to a little over an hour if necessary. I’ve practised on girls I know well, I’m happy to mess up with them and now I’m ready to potentially be paid to teach these sessions.