the sunshine state

My first week as an RA at the Orlando Ballet School summer intensive has finally come to an end.

It just might have been the longest and most exhausting week of my life.

Summer intensives are exhausting to begin with, but I didn't expect my RA work to be quite so intense as well. It's not that I have a lot of duties, per say. It's more that I have to be the emotional support for eight fourteen-year-old girls, and then help lay down the law for a hundred and twenty more.

I love my girls. Most of them. The first couple days weren't a problem--we had to have a lot of meetings, spew out an endless number of rules, but everyone seemed well behaved and nice. By the end of the week, everyone was exhausted, and--as tends to happen when you stuff a hundred plus worn out teenagers in a dorm building with nothing to do and no freedom--the problems started emerging.

Bullying. I never expected that to be my biggest problem as an RA. I was prepared for homesickness, injuries, eating disorders, rule-breaking, and general girl cattiness, but I did not expect to find bullies. Maybe it's because I never really experienced bullying as a kid. I was exposed to, and partook in, that general obnoxiousness of pre- and young teen girls, but I never experienced the problem of the bully.

But here, where competitive, determined and aggressive girls from all walks of life are asked to live with each other in harmony, a bully has emerged--and of course, it had to be one of my girls.

I'm pretty sure that she's not aware that most of the hurtful things she says are wrong at all. The racist slurs that have been brought to my attention seem to be the fault of ignorance, not maliciousness. But still, she has a certain manipulative quality; she can make her little friends do exactly what she wants them to do, and she tries to manipulate me by cheerfully threatening an angry phone call from her mother.

I'm not sure how much of a problem she'll pose. She was relatively responsive when we had a little chat about being really careful about the things you say about other peoples' homes and cultures, and her bullying seems to be more of a consequence of her lifestyle than an outright attack. So we'll see.

Overall, it's going to be an interesting and valuable experience, I think. Exhausting, absolutely; frustrating, undoubtedly; but valuable just the same.