Working with Teens.

This is my first blog, and I am at work, so I am keeping it short.

What is the best way to connect with teenage city girls? I find that with most groups, a quick way to get attention and affection with interest is through humor. This weekend, my second job the "Great Outdoors University" is taking a group of teenage city girls out to the woods. Daunting for many. Luckily I have some exposure through my teenage sister. To make sure they have a good time, you have to allow them to connect to you and to their surroundings. Often, a goofy attitude can at least remove some of the stress of them meeting you and being in a small group away from home. Sometimes, it's annoying. So then, a different side of ones personality is useful.
Knowledge of the natural world is definitely something I feel the need to share sometimes, but scientific knowledge can get boring, and the GOU offers courses, not classes. Lecturing on a hike is NOT cool. The best responses come from the "wow" material. "Peanuts have been called goober peas in the old south because an African word for peanut was 'dguba'." I just call them yum. It's the quick quips that stick.
Finally, one of the other ways that help me to show kids how to connect to the woods, is to show them how to have fun in it. My experiences include log walking like on a balance beam, climbing slippery rock and dirt ravines, getting my feet wet, and looking for little crawlers. Most of the kids we bring out have never had the opportunity for these experiences.
Besides being young with some knowledge of pop culture, neither being afraid of this demographic nor appearing like an authoritative figure is what loosens these kids up into a more "natural" state of mind.
When a good time makes an impression, the kids we work with are eager to come back. As we have heard from many letters that we have them right for one of our activities, every single person there has something good to say about what we do. Not just good words and memory tidbits, but profound prose even in the shortest of paragraphs and incomplete sentences. We see that we have connected with them, and they have opened their mind to being outside and away from the city.