Excerpt from a required "journal entry / reflection" for the Intern Program, in April 2011.
Our eldest dog, Ellie, is a mutt. She has a fine skeleton and delicate long black fur, and her sense of hearing and smell are obviously as finely tuned as her body: she is constantly on edge. She barks when a silent woman pushing a silent stroller turns the corner onto our street; she knows when a family member has woken up, even if she’s in the basement or barking at the back hedge. She must see the world as a very dangerous place, for she barks furiously at anything non-family, and is perpetually doing “perimeter checks”—going around the whole yard and the border of the house, looking and smelling and barking out warnings. She is never comfortable until we’re all in the same room and sitting down, each holding a book or some knitting as a sign of our intention to remain put.
When we go on a field trip, I know exactly how Ellie feels.
On the one hand, I am so pleased to see the kids exposed to something new—in particular the strangeness of a new place, new sorts of objects, and new ways of receiving information (e.g. what does this old campaign office tell us about politics? history? technology?). On the other hand, these new places are also unfamiliar places, past the safe borders of the school building. In this open frontier I apparently revert to a state of total anxiety. I do not have Ellie’s military efficiency, but I am inclined to do the human version of herding—walking along the edges of the short milling crowd with my arms extended, murmuring remonstrance or encouragements.
I’m not sure how much of this is reasonable behavior, and how much a product of my own hyper-awareness of potential danger. Is it either reasonable or beneficial to expect students to be as quiet and controlled in new place as they are in school? How far (how many inches? feet? yards?) should students be allowed to spread out in a given space? How might you quietly and quickly bring this group back together when there are other teaching groups in the same area? Is it possible to warn students of potential danger ahead of time without also frightening them? How do you impress the seriousness of safe behavior while also allowing a sense of discovery and excitement?
And even if the new space feels safe, I wonder about how much freedom one should allow. Are there negative behaviors which one might not focus on, in order to focus on others more relevant to the setting? For example, is a field trip the best place to remind F-- and M-- (for the hundredth time) to stop holding onto each others’ arms? Would it be more beneficial to only ask them to focus on listening, or perhaps to ask them to ponder a question which they would both find interesting and might talk about? Is a field trip the best place to incessantly ask for [Proper Learning Position] checks, when you know that some students are able to listen quite well with their knees folded up to their chins? Then again, these examples assume that the class is otherwise in order and controlled. So how do you define “order and control” for a field trip to a museum? to a botanical garden? to a library? to a community farm?
This litany of anxious questions makes it sound like a field trip is one of the rings of hell. That’s not how I feel at all! On the contrary, I think I’m aware of my anxiety so intensely precisely because the rest of the fieldtrip experience has so much potential and excitement. I enjoy the challenge of the preparation before the trip: how much information to give, how to whet their appetite for more, how to focus or frame all the information they’ll be receiving or could be interested in. In third grade, I enjoyed the prep for the Mary Baker Eddy trip; I got to give both concrete details to contextualize her life and work (so that they could make a very basic sense of it), while also hinting at some of the big-picture questions which she and her work raise. And after the trip, there’s the challenge of giving a way to process what they’ve seen, to share questions, but also to focus some of the information into a coherent picture to hold onto.
In the meantime, I’ll just try to be thankful that I don’t have to take anyone on a hiking trip.
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