Originally Posted by
bragi
...their biggest complaints were (in order of frequency):
1. They had to use outhouses or portable toilets more often than not;
2. It was too muddy (I'm not making this up);
3. There weren't any choices about what to eat at meals. (In students' defense, I personally think the camp did do a poor job here when it came to accommodating food allergies, but otherwise this one left me as perplexed as the other complaints.)
Those kids had obviously not been pre-sold on the idea of roughing it. They come into a sports game after years of soaking up cultural messages about how much we value athletic contests, and that's where the positive attitude comes from. By contrast, they receive few cultural messages about how much we value interaction with nature at the outhouse & mud level.