I always felt it was important to supplement and give context to what the kids were learning in school, so very early on I decided that summers were going to be special educational experiences. Mommy Boot Camp has evolved over the years, sometimes it's vacations with an educational twist, most recently "Mommy Boot Camp" has become the key descriptor for anything I think my kids should be especially aware of. For Cay, for example, it's certain films with distinct or relevant themes, styles, camera usage, costuming... But in it's early days, it was a summer long assignment with a monetary reward.
BTW, the ONLY one of my kids who absolutely refused to be part of any Mommy Boot Camp, even the ones I thought would be fun, was Todd. He noticed early on that his siblings didn't finish "Mommy Boot Camp" and dropped out just before the reward.
The person who got the furthest was Ellen (The Brine Queen). I remember one year she was determined to earn the $50 prize. She was in High School at the time, and had just signed up for IB Social Studies for that fall semester. Her Boot Camp assignment was an essay, in which she discussed the ethnic, religious, and political history of the Balkans and how it contributed to the current unrest and violence in the region.
She thought it was a stupid assignment, but she started digging in, complaining all the time. There was no structure given her, only a due date, and she handed in her first rough draft early. The rough draft was pretty good, but didn't delve deep enough into the religious diversity of the region, although the discussion of the ethnic cleansings in the region was pretty well thought out. I hand it it back to her and told her to finish the assignment, but she was unhappy that she'd spent so much time on this already. I told her why I thought the religious component was important, and that it was often neglected in the news stories written about the conflict. We had a brief discussion about it, which ended aburptly when she told me in no uncertain terms that this was the stupidest, most useless Mommy Boot Camp I'd ever assigned, and that she had no intention of finishing it, and it simply wasn't worth $50, which she'd calculated to be an average hourly wage of too close to nothing.
And we didn't speak of it again, until the following Spring, when she came home from her IB final. "Mom," she said, excitedly, "You know how the last portion of the IB is an essay and you get to choose which of the three you do?"
"yeah..."
"Well, you'll never guess. One of the essays was on the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It wasn't covered in our class, but I knew so much about it so I did that one. NAILED IT!"
I don't think any of the kids realized that as much time as they spent doing "Mommy Boot Camp", mommy was out figuring out what knowledge would best benefit them at the time.
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