On Christmas Eve, Charlie said that he was worried that he might be unable to sleep.
“Too excited,” he said.
“You must follow the Brouse Rule of Sleeping,” I told him. “You know the rule. Right?”
He did.
The Brouse Rule of Sleeping was bestowed upon me a few years ago by my friend and former colleague, Steve Brouse, while taking care of students overnight at Camp Jewell, a YMCA camp in northern Connecticut. I had been bringing students to this camp for two decades, but it was Steve’s first time.
During a meeting with the boys prior to sending them off to bed, a student asked, “What f I can’t fall asleep?”
Steve jumped in. “You either sleep or you pretend to sleep. Those are your only two options.”
Sleep or pretend to sleep.
Brilliant.
Practical. Specific. Unarguable. Best of all, this rule increases the chances of the child falling asleep while doing nothing to jeopardize the sleep of those around him.
I began using this rule every year until the pandemic hit, preventing us from returning to Camp Jewell.
I also brought the rule home to my kids.
In fairness, Charlie ended up in a sleeping bag on our floor on Christmas Eve. Even with the Brouse Rule in effect, he could not sleep and was anxious about spending the whole night awake and alone. We would never allow him to sleep in our bed, of course, but a sleeping bag on the floor is acceptable in circumstances such as these.
Despite the uncomfortable floor, he was out like a light.
Side note:
Camp Jewell is open once again, but as is the case so often, administrators never let a good crisis go to waste, so we have yet to return to a place where we had been bringing students for almost 50 years.
Just easier, I suspect, to make the trip quietly go away than muster the time and resources required to return an important and vital tradition to our students, many of whom have never been away from home, never been hiking in a forest, and never had the opportunity to discover the confidence and strength that comes from doing something new, hard, and maybe a little bit scary.
It infuriates me.
When I retire from teaching someday, it will be because of shortsighted, cowardly decisions like these.
