Field Trips

Spring is in the air, and spring always makes me want to take field trips.  Now, from a teachers’ perspective, field trips are the worst.  The absolute worst.  They involve so many stinking forms and permission slips.  You have to fill out a separate form for each person involved in any aspect of a school (teachers, parents, principals, district administration, transportation, food service, nurses, specials, any type of aide or resource teacher). 

Then there’s the money…the dreaded money.  How much does it cost to get in?  How much does it cost to drive there?  How do I divide the $20 per mile bus/gas fee by 120 students?  Will they round up to 5 if we go 4.7 miles?  What about chaperones?  Oh shoot, what if no parents will come help me?  Oh shoot, what if all the parents want to come help?  How do I decide which ones have to pay and which ones don’t?  What if I get robbed between collecting money from students and turning it in to the office (because that is a legitimate fear in The Hood)?  What if half my class can’t pay?  Can I afford that?  What if someone pays, then doesn’t show up that day and their parents demand the money back?  But then the financial secretary can’t refund the $4 because it was already deposited?  What if they just start yelling at me to give them their $4 back?

These are just the extra questions on top of the gajillion you already have to deal with because you are a teacher and nobody knows what the crap is going on in public education.

Anyways, my first year in The Hood, I somehow managed to get my kindergarten class to the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.  

This is mostly a museum for adults, but they had a transportation grant (which eliminated all the $20 per mile x 7 miles to the museum divided by 120 students madness).  And I somehow got enough adults to go that we could have manageable-sized groups.  Plus God blessed me with 1-on-1 parental support for my kiddos who liked to run off.  I figured that things would mostly go okay, and I would be pretty available in case of emergency or overwhelmed parent.

I don’t know if you realize this, but museums with important and expensive pieces of art, like the Oklahoma Western Heritage Museum, have many alarms and such that sound just in case people try to steal the said important and expensive pieces of art.  Also, kindergartners like to touch things they are not supposed to touch, like important and expensive pieces of art.  And when these kindergartners are not monitored with an eagle-eye, they WILL touch what they are not supposed to regardless of how many times you said not to or the extreme consequences you threatened.  When they do this, it looks as though they are trying to steal the important and expensive pieces of art and ALL the alarms in the museum will sound.  And even if you saw it coming and slo-mo launched yourself at the kindergartner to stop them from touching the art and were only a half-second late, the alarms will STILL sound.  And they are very loud.

So I locked them in a jail cell...

They also tried to climb onto the horse, but they were too short.  Luckily this was in the "hands on" section of the museum.

I know all this because it happened to me.  Never again have I taken a large group of young children to a museum for adults.