In the educational community we call them field trips, but I have no idea why. I wonder if that term comes from the days when the entire school met in one house in the middle of nowhere and to go anywhere from the school, everyone had to walk through a field. No matter how it got its name, the field trip is one of the most exciting events for students and clearly one of the most dreaded among teachers. Lesson plans must be written for those students who don’t attend, transportation must be arranged, money almost always changes hands and a strict accounting must be made. Field trips are valuable, actually essential to the educational system, but can be stressful if not traumatic.In my twenty-eight years of teaching, I have conducted countless field trips. My career began as a choir director, so I was constantly taking students to choral music events. I taught math for two years in America before moving overseas and I don’t remember taking students on any field trips. Freud would probably say field-trip stress was somehow related by my switch from choir to math.
I then moved to England to teach for the Department of Defense. We were constantly going on field trips, again for musical purposes, but also to take students off the base where they lived, went to church, shopped and went to school. Living in a foreign country is for most people a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and overseas educators feel, as they rightly should, that some of the onus for getting those children out into their host country falls upon the schools.
When the base in England closed, I was re-assigned to The Netherlands where I continued to teach instrumental music as well as a few math classes. Once again, I was taking students on music-related trips. During those first two years we formed a pep-band, something our school had never had before. I arranged for a bus (in the Netherlands, all students are transported on city buses) to take us to a school in Belgium to play during a basketball game. I had no idea where the American School of Brussels was; I expected the driver to know since I had listed that as our destination on the bus request forms. He did not.
We drove to downtown Brussels and I got off the bus to hail a cab. The driver spoke no English, but he did understand I was clearly lost and my destination was the American School of Brussels. He indicated he would take us there, but we had to pay him about sixty dollars worth of local currency which I collected in bits from the students on board.
After two years in the Netherlands, I took the eighth grade math position. Our teaching team was constantly looking for opportunities to take the students someplace where their education would be enhanced. That first year, we decided to take all eighty of them to the Christmas Market in Aachen, Germany, a city just over the border from the Netherlands. Christmas markets are a very popular idea in European cities. They resemble an American flea market, except the fleas are much more chic. Also, there is always a beer tent, where people as young as fourteen can get all the beer they can pay for, with their parents permission, of course.
On the day, we loaded two buses with students, parents, and teachers. The drive took about thirty minutes and we arrived without incident. We de-boarded the buses, placed students in pre-arranged groups with a team-teacher and parents, and then we entered the market covering the city center, what would be several square blocks in American terms.
This was a great field trip and turned out to be one of our best. We walked and shopped with our students and taught them as much as we could about German culture. Many of the booths held the students’ fascination, just as they would in any American city’s festival. We wore ourselves out walking and walking. By noon, I was ready for the buses to take us back to our school in time for lunch.
One by one our groups arrived at the meeting point. Students who had not been grouped with friends quickly found them and loaded the buses. I was thinking everything was going well, like a person who has no idea he or she has wandered to the thinnest part of the ice, or the classic circus clown who has no idea his shoe is on fire.
When we arrived at the school, students were already asking about Chris. We couldn’t find him on our bus so we figured he was on the other one. We watched as students disembarked, waiting for that familiar face to appear. It did not. We searched the buses in case he was sleeping. He was not. The four team teachers huddled together outside the buses and faced the obvious truth. Our professional resumes would now include: once left a student in a foreign country on a field trip.
We went into the school as a group to face the principal with the news and get instructions about what to do next. On the way there, we talked about how we should have known that Chris, the product of an American military man and a Greek mother would need special attention. He was always trouble in our classrooms. Chris didn’t struggle to understand what we taught; he was very smart. Chris didn’t have ADD, ADHD, or emotional problems. Chris simply worked against what we teachers tried to accomplish in our rooms. Sometimes passively, sometimes aggressively, Chris subverted our plans, purposely did the wrong thing, and caused headaches for whichever one of us was in charge.
When we arrived at the office, the principal was already waiting for us. Chris was fine. He called his father at work and his mother had gone to Aachen to get him. The mother had called the school to ask for a conference during our afternoon meeting time. The principal wanted to know how this happened. My female colleague who taught English in the group spoke up. “It’s my fault,” she said. “He was in my group. He must have slipped away during the trip to the buses and I didn’t realize it.”
“What you’ve done is inexcusable. There is no explanation you can give for not checking role before the buses left. I hold all of you responsible. I have no idea what you’ll say to his mother this afternoon.”
We were dismissed from the principal’s office. We had an hour to create our story so we got to work quickly. Actually we had no story. We had made a mistake that could have cost us our careers, but Chris’ calm thinking protected him, and us, from the worst that this situation could have brought us. In the end, it was this very difficult student who had saved the day for all of us.
When his mother arrived, she brought upset mother’s passion with her. She was very distressed about our having left Chris and wanted to know how it could have happened. We apologized all over ourselves. We had no excuse. We were so humbled and grateful that Chris was alright. We bragged on the quick thinking and resourcefulness of this kid that drove us all nuts. We apologized for what we had put her through. We were wrong. We were sorry. Mother forgave us, and left.
Suddenly, we could all breathe again.
A few basics underly the successful field trip: order buses early, distribute a permission slip and collect one for each student with the telephone number of every parent, to use when you return to the school at eleven o’clock and one student is left without a ride.
Somehow, I learned to handle the unexpected and emergencies. I could tell you of the trip I took with junior high boys to sing with my grandfather’s barbershop choir, how two twin boys snuck a stowaway with alcohol on the bus, how they ran into the woods when I confronted them, how I called the police from the monastery where were singing and then, quite appropriately slipped to my knees and begged God to intervene.
I could tell of having to send two buses home while my bus went to the police station in the city we were visiting to pick up an eighth grade girl who had been arrested at the mall for shoplifting. I've already shared the story of how my band students were returning home to England from a week long trip to the continent when just before we were to catch the ferry, one boy hit his best friend in the eyebrow with a baseball sized rock, actually losing a round of “who can throw a rock the closest to someone without actually hitting the person.”
I've also shared the story of kayak day during Adventure Week, an outdoor education trip with eighth grade students, and how two girls, children of people I worked with at the school, tipped over in their kayak after coming through the rapids and couldn’t get their heads above water for about an eighth of a mile.
Then there are the trips I took with students as a cheerleading sponsor, volleyball coach and tennis coach. And then there is the trip when, during my first year of teaching, I took a class of eighth graders from my classroom around the outside of the school to the elementary section so I could show them the baby grand piano and when we arrived one of them was smoking a cigarette!
The most important thing I’ve learned about field trips is that the sponsor needs to be prepared to be prepared. There are no perfect field trips. Something will happen that you did not expect and will challenge your wits in the moment. The more thinking you’ve done, the better prepared you’ll be to handle what comes. But when it comes, just keep thinking.
Picture Credit: http://www.ccboe.net/rre/3/home.html
