Tours x 5

During the last two days of the VTH's open house, I gave 5 tours. That's as many tours as I usually give in two months!

I was signed up for two shifts yesterday (11-1 and 1-4) and gave three tours. The first two tours yesterday were fairly unremarkable -- groups of 15-20 people, mostly parents with kids, some adult couples without kids, occasionally the odd high school or college kid seriously interested in going to vet school.

I did have one guy on my second tour yesterday who appeared to be there by himself. During the 70 minute tour, he compulsively straightened every framed photo and poster that we walked by in the hallways. One part of me thought, "I like it!" A second part of me was thinking, "Yikes..." And a third part of me thought, "You must not realize that another giant group of unruly kids is going to come along in 5 minutes and knock all of those awry again."

My third group yesterday was about 20 high school kids from a private school in Colorado Springs where they can evidently take health- and science-based courses (their electives, at least) if they know they want to go into some sort of health profession. They were a little bit squirrely but mostly interested in what I was saying, and it was a bit of a relief to get to talk to more "grown-up"-type people after having kids around for the other tours. I will admit I had a super-fun time emphasizing things like vasectomy techniques for bull elephants and watching the teenage guys cringe. You could say I talked about that stuff a little more than usual, just for the heck of it.

When I first arrived yesterday, carrying Simon in his carrier to hang out at the cat booth, and a poop sample from Johnny to leave at the lab, I immediately encountered several humongous swarms of second graders. Apparently the local schools usually do an annual field trip for kids of a certain age and bring them all to open house. As I did my shifts on Saturday last year, I was unaware of this. I feel quite lucky that throughout my two Friday shifts this year, I managed to avoid having to lead an entire class of second graders with one lone teacher through the hospital and maintain their interest for an hour.

Today, I was only signed up for one shift, 1-4 pm. We are actually only required to volunteer for 2 shifts during the weekend, but they had very few tour guides sign up for the 1-4 pm Saturday shift so I offered to do an extra one. Good thing I did! I arrived at about 12:50 so I could have a few minutes to check in, but was immediately bombarded by a frazzled-looking tour scheduling person trying to contain three tours' worth of people in the lobby with no available tour guides in sight. So, I was immediately put to work.

Fortunately, things slowed down between my first tour and my second, although since there were fewer guides, I only got about a 5 minute break between tours.

My second and last tour today was my favorite tour of all weekend. By the fifth time around, I think I got into a pretty good rhythm and learned some ways to make things more interesting for the kids. Almost every tour I've given as a regular guide (i.e. not during open house) has been to pre-vet students -- mostly high school or college kids who are really seriously interested in going to vet school, know some medical lingo, don't need to have minute details explained to them, and are genuinely interested in everything. The "family crowd" that we get at open house needs to have a really different style of tour.

So I figured out to do things like, when we are looking at the scrub sinks where the students scrub before surgery, I ask, "Do any of you guys wash your hands before dinner? Well, we have to wash our hands before surgery! Does anybody have a guess about how long we spend washing our hands?" (The kids guess anywhere from 30 seconds to an hour. Answer: 8-10 minutes. They are usually really impressed.) There is also a fairly boring part of the tour where tour groups also happened to get pretty backed up and I ended up having to just sort of stall and talk about random things. I figured out that the next stop on the tour was the diagnostic lab booth, which had bacterial cultures and fertilized chick eggs and WORMS in jars, so it was fun getting them geared up for that when they were getting bored. (The kids were all, "Worms! COOL!" and the parents were like, "Worms? Grosssss...")

So my last group was about 20-25 people, with probably 6-8 kids along from ages 5-12 or so. The kids were SO attentive and asked really good questions. The adults made at least a sincere attempt to laugh at my little jokes. A couple of the parents were really, really interested in everything. At the very beginning of the tour, I did my typical introduction: "Hi, welcome to the Veterinary Teaching Hospital, my name is yada-yada and I'll be your tour guide today, I am a sophomore or second-year student in the vet school, it is a four-year program, so I am almost halfway done" --- at this point everybody spontaneously cheered for me. I knew then it was going to be a good group. :-)

At the end of the tour, I thanked them all for coming and offered to answer any questions, etc. before sending them out to the exhibits and booths. I complimented the kids on their focus and thanked them for their good questions. Everybody clapped! The parents all said I did a great job and I got some remarks about "I can't believe what a great job you did keeping their attention for this long." They all seemed like well-behaved kids to begin with, but that was still really rewarding as I never feel that comfortable around kids and had struggled a little with some of the earlier groups.

As a bonus, I got to leave a little early - around 3:30 instead of 4 as scheduled. Yesterday I left at 4:40 when my last tour finished - no tours were supposed to start after 3:15 but my scheduled school group didn't get their till 3:30 and most of the other guides had left already, so I got to stick around. But today I had time to get gas and stop by the pathology building to pick up my forgotten anesthesia notes and still get home early.

Now I just have to remember that next time I give a tour it's going to be grown-ups again, and I have to put the little kid voice away...