Field trips

MsB is the pseudonym for a second-year high school English teacher in Brooklyn.

Some of my students have never left Brooklyn. This scares me. Does this mean they never will?

Isn’t it our job as educators to expand minds? We teach culture and art and life skills. I want to take my kids out of Brooklyn. There is a whole world out there for them and they don’t know anything past their block.

Looking at them, I see myself. I was just like them growing up in Brooklyn, not aware that life existed past New York until someone showed me. I welcomed the opportunity to show my students in return, until I started the paperwork.

Planning trips is not easy. If it were easy, more teachers would go on them. There is paperwork after paperwork, and then more paperwork. I need letters to parents, detailed itineraries filled with the various points along the way as to where and when I will take attendance. I need transportation forms, and lunch forms, and more attendance forms, and coverage forms, and more permission slips than I have ever seen in all my life. It takes weeks to get all the appropriate signatures and to make all the copies.

Why is something that is so important to a student’s development so difficult to do? There is so much to experience in New York City. Often, I have tons of ideas for trips that never materialize just because it’s too much work.

This month alone I am taking my students on two trips. First, we are going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has everything that links up to whatever you are teaching. There is literally something for everyone. I enjoy working with that museum since they have plenty of education materials for the kids. They have class trips everyday and are very organized and helpful.

However, because museums have a tendency to be, dare I say, “boring,” I made up a scavenger hunt for the kids. They walk around the museum looking for the answers to their clues, and I find they appreciate the autonomy. The first one I made was for the Greek and Roman art galleries. Since everything is confined to a few rooms, it makes keeping an eye on them easy. Through the scavenger hunt, they had to use their knowledge of the Greek gods/goddesses to know what to look for in the galleries. It was a great assessment tool for me. Not to mention, they enjoy playing detective and racing around the museum to finish the hunt. Afterwards, we reconvened and talked about what they saw.

Also, because the museum is so close to Central Park, it would be a crime not to visit there. We had a nice picnic lunch and sketched things from nature and wrote haiku poems. This time we are going back to look at the medieval armor and again, there are fun assignments attached to it. There will be another scavenger hunt, and other creative writing assignments. What better way is there to learn than by having fun?

The next trip I am planning is for The Canterbury Tales. We are going on a pilgrimage to live the tales. Is not the point of literature to experience it? We have written our own tales in class and will be going on a nature walk through Brooklyn’s own Salt Marshes sharing our stories. Hopefully, the reflection we do along the way will lead to some self-knowledge. We will be journaling and sketching and writing and sharing. Again, there will be a picnic and time to sit and think and find nature in our bustling city. We will all be Chaucer for a day and through literature we will find ourselves.

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