A Perfect Strike!

I'll admit upfront I am not a huge field trip guy.  Done correctly, there is definite value, but too often these just represent mini vacations from the classroom with some real reach employed to justify educational value.

The worst I ever experienced was as a first year teacher at a junior high some genius decided we should take our students to an indoor pool to promote "team building."  My mind swirled with what could wrong.  Teenagers changing in bathing suits.  Hands below the water line.  Drowning.  Of course with in 5 minutes of the kids hitting the water one kids slipped and hit her head on the deck and the life guard had to go in to make a save on another kid.

My favorite tale though was also while I was a teaching junior high.  The school took most of the kids to a professional baseball game.  I believe this was a reward for not getting suspended (or something to that effect).  Again taking hundreds of kids into the city in an unstructured environment where alcohol, cigarettes, profanity and strangers were abundant simply didn't seem like a good calculated risk.  Of course we didn't have problems with any of those things (other than me not being able to get a beer at the game...).  That's not to say the say the day went smoothly for everyone.  This particular ball park, like most, has rafters that cover portions of the seats.  Birds can often be found flying overhead and landing in these rafters.  As we were finding our seats, one of these birds took a huge shit right on one of the students.  I didn't see the bird but I can only assume that it was about the size of a Terradactyl and fresh from large meal at Applebee's because this poor kids was cover like no victim of bird aim I'd ever seen (a perfect bulls-eye too of course).  The boy's hair was cakes and it was running down his shoulders and coats.  It was disgusting.

The student reacted the same way I would have.  He sat down right where he was on the steps of the stadium and cried.  Every return trip I've ever made to that park, I wind up looking up more than at the field.  I'm sure I'll be writing soon about how I caught a foul ball in the neck...

Would love to hear some more misadventures in field trips!