Problem vs. Challenge

“Problem turned into challenge” was a lesson we learned through doing a group activity. During this activity we were split into teams and had to find the pathway across a maze without getting “shocked.” We were only given one minute to discuss our strategy within our group, and after that minute we could not talk to each other. To add to the activity, we were pretending that it was costing us money for every minute we did not complete the task, and we also lost money by talking, or not retracing our steps properly to get off of the maze. These interferences could have completely hindered our situation, but we chose to take it as a challenge and complete the task!

Becky Barker is who came to visit us. She is the director of Leadership Development and Volunteerism.

My senior year of high school I was the president of my school’s Student Council. A big event that we do every year is the “Arctic Blast,” which is just a day at the end of first semester to reward the students at our school for a good semester. They get out of class all afternoon, we give out prizes, and there are many games and skits. The theme my senior year was black light, which was a wonderful IDEA. A group was in charge of getting black lights donated. The day before “Arctic Blast” we were informed that not enough black lights had been donated; in fact we only had two. Since I was the leader in charge, everyone looked to me to try and get this problem fixed. I could have chosen to completely freak out that day, but instead I calmly considered my options. After using my resources and calling around to the other schools that had used the black light idea in the past, I finally found a school willing to lend us their black lights. Once we got the word that Bishop Kelley High School was letting us use their lights, two of my fellow officers and I headed to go get them.