2010
field trip
maura @ 11:01 pm
Today I took the day off so I could go on a field trip with Gus’s class. This is the field trip I’ve wanted to go on forever, the one where they get to celebrate building the wigwam in the park and do all kinds of cool ancient Native American things like try to make fire with a firebow.
I had completely forgotten that I suck at field trips. I haven’t had as much free time the past couple of years as I did when Gus was younger, so I don’t really know as many of the other parents + kids as I used to. Gus tends to be not on his best behavior when I’m around in a school-like setting, alternately clingy or not listening/paying attention. I never know quite what I’m supposed to be doing, and end up standing around feeling like an awkward extra appendage, not really talking much with the other parents.
There’s also the transport issue: often they get a bus to shuttle them to and from trips, but today they couldn’t so we took 29 fourth graders on three (3!) subways to go 2.8 miles. In rush hour! By the time we got there I was already exhausted. Luckily I had forgotten to bring hot chocolate (not entirely my fault! the pre-field trip directions were unclear!), so I had to walk a couple of blocks over to Dunkin Donuts and get 2 big boxes of it. Which was a great opportunity to purchase supplemental coffee (yay!).
I was also a little bit disappointed that I couldn’t get the kids to split up into groups nicely to do the skulls, skins and tracks matching activity. They were real skulls, so I got all zooarchaeological. Some kids were into it, and some were not. Gus was able to ID the skull, skin and tracks of the beaver (big front teeth!), so that’s something.
I shouldn’t complain: we were finished early enough that I had time to hightail it up to City College to finish the last of my 2 student interviews for my research project this semester. And Gus was happy to have me there. And no one barfed in the subway station.
(When Gus was in kindergarten I went with his class on a trip to the Whitney museum on the Upper East Side, 20 kindergarteners on 2 (maybe 3?) subways! It was intense, and there was no coffee when we got there. One of his classmates barfed as we were walking through the subway station to change trains and we just had to leave it there. I felt so bad, but what could we do? The group was moving forward, and we were far from a booth with a subway employee. A friend later told me that she knows a parent who brings a small plastic bag full of cat litter on every field trip for that very reason.)
