Campdub, good points and it's frustrating that this conversation turned from an acutal conversation to a spar on the nature of debate. That took away, again, from something that I find to be a real issue.
To me, even if camp names are just fun and don't do any harm (which I feel that they have the potential to), they create a level of disconnect between people's camp lives and their "real world" lives. I don't like this disconnect and I don't find it to be necessary. I think that this clear cut where campers will then go back into the real world and resume their "real name" gets in the way of the work we do at camp. Campers and staff grow, learn and develop at camp. We should be encouraging everyone to take what they learn and gain at camp and take that with them the rest of the year. If they develop leadership skills at camp, they should take that and apply that to the rest of their life. Having a different name, being identified as something else, to me, risks disconneting one's camp self from one's "real world" self. We should be encouraging everyone to look at camp as part of their real world life, not the escape that they have for a few weeks during the summer.
