My brother Arthur’s favorite person is my profile subject. Jeremy Aron is a sports coach and teacher at the Apple Orchard School, a preschool in Brookline. Apple Orchard is a special place. Kids spend all day outside, looking for sticks, examining frogs or building treehouses. They aren’t rushed; teachers are willing to wait and expect a half-mile walk to take more than two hours.

Jeremy fosters this kind of freedom. He makes school a kind of game for them —how much can you explore? What can you try? Who can you build a team with? Jeremy taught me that creativity and problem-solving are the best ways to nurture yourself and other people.

Arthur is the only one of my siblings to come through Apple Orchard, and we all say he’s the best of us for it. Maybe it’s in his nature to love the bunnies in our yard, or to appreciate gardening. But our family knows it’s the Apple Orchard in him, and that there’s only one other place like it.

Just like at Apple Orchard, students at Bivouac are outside all day, but also all night. They are caked with mud and smell like Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap. And they’ll tell you that they build things all day long. A-frames. Fires. Latrines. Sawbucks.

This September, I came back to Bivouac as a Junior Guide to the Class of 2030, and I knew I wanted to bring the Apple Orchard attitude with me. In my squad, this happened in one of two ways. First, I tried to meet their curiosity. Instead of collecting firewood, one boy wanted to build a swing, and so for an hour, we cut rope and tied knots. He told me about his sailing camp this summer, and taught me the clove hitch. I stood on a bucket to tie the ropes around trees, while he knotted them to an extra log. We could’ve been finishing our sawbuck or looking for kindling, but it was his Bivouac, and it was my job to encourage him.

The second way I tried to bring Apple Orchard with me is what Jeremy calls “getting into their world.” He does this by kneeling and making eye contact with his preschoolers so that they can see him, understand him and engage with him. Getting into the world of freshman boys was a little harder. With my squad, it meant pulling out any reference I had to any football team ever, or helping them play harmless pranks on one another. Sometimes it meant I dropped “bro” five times in a sentence. But, most of the time, it required me to get creative with how I framed the tasks they had to do.

On the second day, all the squads built their A-frames. This can be a harrowing process. I cried out of frustration building my own A-frame freshman year. This year, no one could or wanted to remember how to lash branches together. I continued to teach them, over and over, and none of them could demonstrate it back to me. So I “got into their world” and made a game out of it. Whoever could lash the fastest and tightest would get an extra chicken sandwich at dinner. Losers had to dance. Our A-frame was up twenty minutes later, and we couldn’t stop laughing.

During my profile observation, Jeremy told me he just wants his Apple Orchard students to be curious and have fun. This year, Squad 13 built their campsite with games and laughs, and it was one of the best groups I’ve ever been a part of.