What is Trucha Camp

Trucha Camp© is the name of the physical education program that I started at Lincoln Elementary School in the year 2001. It was birthed out of necessity. After being trained in the Kinesiology Department at Fresno State I was ready to teach. I was in for a rude awakening. My first year teaching some children didn’t like PE and they told me so, “PE sucks!” “PE! It doesn’t have any redeeming value!” I realized that if physical education was going to have a positive impact in the lives of children something had to be done. PE alone wasn’t going to capture the hearts of children.

I did not want to teach students in a negative environment. How could I make it positive? I began to take a look into society. We have a sedentary culture where children today like to spend their time in front of computers, with video games, and television.

I also peered into my child hood looking for an answer. How had I felt about physical education? It was there where I found some clear answers. The most outstanding aspects of my childhood experiences were participating in 4-H camp. It was in 4-H camp where I became involved in non-competitive physical activity. I loved camping, being up at the mountains, living out doors, and staying up late at night toasting marshmallows. I felt free. However, I noticed that there was little diversity in these camps. Over a span of eight years I was one of seven Latino children out of two hundred plus yearly campers?

Also, in psychological studies of the criminal penal system, one experience is common to inmates. They never heard they were loved while growing up. Today, many children still are being exposed to the same destructive practice. As a result, low self-esteem and rebelliousness appear frequently in our students.

Educational abuse was another particular aspect of my childhood experience. Because I spoke broken English. I was placed in the class for students with mental and physical disabilities. From this unique perspective I noticed that those who had disabilities and were non-athletic were sometimes physically and verbally abused by other students. All of these experiences played a key role in developing Trucha Camp© as a concept to break down the wall of hostility against physical education.

I knew that it would be challenging, the word Trucha was the starting point. First of all, the most unique aspect is the name. Trucha means trout, which is the state fish in California. Camping has been made available for every child, regardless of ethnicity or social class. These children may not have the money to go to all those other camps during the summer but they can go to Trucha Camp© all year round. They can have fun also even if their parents earn minimum wages, are farm workers, and have menial jobs. Children don’t have to suffer any more, they can experience camping now, at school, in Trucha Camp©.

The very idea of going camping during school time is innovative. Being imaginative is stepping into a dream world. Can there be any better fertile soil for the imagination than playing hooky from school? It is the experience of Huckleberry Fin going into the Mississippi River with his friend Tom Sawyer.

Socially, the word trucha has deep roots in the Latino community. It is a word that means survival. And the best way to survive is to know the rules of the Trucha Camp© doing what’s good right and true. Trucha is a motivator word. Nobody wants to be non-trucha. Trucha means to be aware with your eyes open, alert, and ready for anything. Also, Trucha means to be able to interact with other students. A person, like a trout, needs to survive all the difficulties of its environment. To be Trucha means to have fun and to be intelligent in life. I’ve integrated some concepts that I learned from Ramses Noriega (retired professor out of UCLA who has over 30 years of teaching experience and organizing).