What We Did on Tuesday

What you see here is a picture that was taken yesterday in a very candid moment. This is called 'We are in the last 20 minutes of our field trip for the day, and I technically don't know where many of the students really are.' Why would this be the caption? Becuase we had set them loose into these woods looking for fossils.  With hammers.  And while this looked good and approachable on paper, there was briefly a very real moment of yawning fear in seeing ourselves live out this plan.

At one point, one teacher very comfortably shared, "We must be insane to be doing this."  And that broke the tension of unvoiced fears.  And after that, at least for me, everything was ok.  Kids climb around in the woods all of the time at home, right?  (This is when I feel incredelous about the 'hows' of parenting.)



But.

I should say right away that our students are well-behaved and teachers were well-organized.  We knew the plan, but in the afternoon it was a loose one.  And kids were hearing annoucements through whistle bursts.  And the science teacher DID say, 'Welcome to Jurrasic Park'.  It was that kind of an afternoon.  And actually one really perfect for exploration because the day before it had been snowing, and on that day, it was breezy and sunny.  I was grateful.

You read about kids running through the woods and think 'free for all'.  Or maybe even 'Hunger Games'.  (So not.)  But moments like that in teaching really prove what sort of genuineness (is that a word?) that you have with your students, because being especially strict means that you can also give them lots of freedom.  And they will listen to you the first time when you are shouting in the woods. 

The excitement I was seeing in students who were dragging around large tablets of stone with a bunch of fossils in them made the day fill more akin to the life of Tom Sawyer...instead of Piggy in Lord of the Flies? (No, none of that, please.  Now THAT is a horrifying book.)  Suddenly there are a lot of references to adolsecents striking out on their own in the woods in these paragraphs....?  I digress.  

I have ideas about trusting students and then not trusting students (those go hand in hand and become interchangable when decisions using the developing frontal lobe become tricky).  The students were just running around and having fun.  And it worked.  But they were scaling ravines, not happily camped out within sight of a bus in a small fossil pit.  And while kids were mostly just fine leaping around huge hills like gazelles, my heart did drop into my stomach when one kid was way too high up and we told him to make his way down and HE said, "What if this was real?  It would be really scary."

And suddenly I am shouting up to him, "This is very, very real!!"

My friend Leigh is a comrade in the life of middle school teaching. Many of things I experience and write about are happening when we are standing right next to each other. She has these really great artsy, red leather couches in her classroom. And sometimes at the end of the day some of the teachers sit there and connect without standing in front of 30 people...this is a common relief at 4 pm, especially for the introverts. No more teaching, but sometimes piecing the rest of it the day together. 

It is nice to have this confidante, and on a day like yesterday, she was the person who I really laughed with. We are such good friends that we have begun to dress alike on the same days. If one of us comes in wearing a black dress and heels, the other one does too...the differences are in the style of the heel or the color of the tights. And last week we brought in the exact same thing for lunch. 

We attempted and successfully accomplished a rather large field trip, and while of course in a group of 180 there will be glitches, there was a shocking amount of normalcy in it all too. I think the kids had fun, and on the bus ride home they were either staring off into space, or they were in the back of the bus singing together in louder than usual voices. In these moments, the last 5 miles back to school, I usually begin to develop a very dull headache. And I never get headaches. But seeing the kids in this state is generally a good sign. Today the entire 7th and 8th grade went to 'The Diary of Anne Frank' at Park Square Theater, and then we went fossil hunting near the Mississippi River.

So 'The Diary of Anne Frank' technically came first in our agenda.  It was so good that you could hear a pin drop in the theater when the students were watching the play.  Anne Frank, who is Kate Lawrey, who is marrying my cousin in June, is amazing!  Every time I'd heard this, I'd believed it, but seeing her act right in front of me showed me just how gifted she really is.  I was extremely affected by the play and it was done very well.  The timing, the chronology of Anne Frank's story, the actors. 

Anyway, what I was struck by so much in this play is that Anne was 14 and very much alive when she wrote in her journal.  I have studied her life, seen the pictures, read her words, and tried to place her in history.  But I knew the end of her story and she had never been so life-like to me before.  It made me cry all the more in imagining her ending. 

It's just like what I was saying the other day...in history you don't see the middle of the story.  And when you watch a play about someone's life, that's just it.  You do.  

I also saw in her character many things that resemble conversations my students have with their parents...the things they tell me about that make their parents seem 'so insane', at least for a while.  And the character of Anne Frank once again reminded everyone of why the world looks the way it dos at 14.  And how much dignity there can be in growing up and thinking about the things going on around you. 

I had just seen something very undignified in social interactions earlier in the week, and this play helped me resolve what was wrong about what I saw.  It is so necessary to see the dignity that is in other people.  And 14 year olds are not omitted from that statement.  The last line of the play is Anne's father crying in a chair and saying, "She puts me to shame."  

And THAT cut me to the quick because that is also true.  And I had marveled at 14 year olds in my presence the same way that very day.  Later in the day it reminded me of the quote by Thomas Gray that simply says...

"Thoughts that breathe,
Words that burn."

I knew I had to get some of these thoughts out in the morning before heading to school to ask for feedback from these 150 people.   Before other peoples' thoughts fill my mind.  All in all, I will gratefully say that things went well, worked out, and were fun.  And I'd say you can't ask for anything more than that when leading a field trip in middle school, en masse or otherwise.