First Field Trip

First, the good news: there hasn't been any more crying. I think the boys mostly like me now. They still don't listen to me, but they like me - it's a start.

The bad news: I had my first field trip on Friday - the Friday that happened to be the last day of school before spring break.

Really, it wasn't SO terrible. The kids were terrible, but the experience was kind of fun, once I figured out what we were doing.

I've been struggling quite a bit this semester with the fact that no one at my school ever tells me anything. Really, ANYTHING. That's just how it is. I didn't know we were going on a field trip until the principal mentioned it yesterday at assembly (oh, and that assembly? I only knew about it because last semester's student teacher - who does not work at this school anymore - told me about it). I didn't know what time we were leaving for said trip - and nearly pulled my hair out when train traffic added 40 extra minutes to my commute this morning (don't worry - we didn't leave until 10:30). I didn't even know where we were going today until we got there.

But whatever, we made it, right?

In fact, our trek from school to the subway to the Hayden Planetarium (woo! shout-out to Neil DeGrasse Tyson - coolest astrophysicist ever!) was so incredibly efficient, even with 100 or so screaming, last-day-of-school-before-spring-break, losing-their-minds-over-finally-getting-to-be-coed 8th graders, that we made it there about an hour before our official entrance time. Do not ask me how taking 100 people on a subway anywhere can be efficient; coming from my six-train commute this morning, I was flabbergasted.

The early arrival worked out, though! No worries! because we had not technically scheduled in a lunchtime for the students! So while we stood around in the beautiful 40 degree spring weather, waiting to be let in, we got to eat lunch. YAY.

I want to take a moment here to point out that many of my students purchased their "lunches" from bodegas and refreshment stands that we passed on our voyage. These lunches consisted largely of chips and candy, and they all seemed perfectly satisfied by these things. I am so glad that we usually force them to eat cafeteria lunch.

After lunch, we managed to wheedle our way inside a little early. The students were supposed to be doing a worksheet that the science teacher had given them. It was full of questions about the exhibit and the universe and whatnot and seemed, really, like an excellent way to help them pass the time without getting into too much trouble.

I think the first question threw them off, though: "What does the sphere in the middle of the room represent?"

Here's the thing about planetariums (planetaria?): There are a lot of spheres hanging around in there. And here's the thing about the super-awesome Hayden Planetarium: It's not really a "room," as in, an obviously enclosed space with four walls and a ceiling and floor and an easily-recognized "center." It is a wide open atrium-type space with a big spiraling ramp that takes you through a few levels of space knowledge. So finding the sphere in the center, and then finding the helpful sign that tells you what it's supposed to represent, takes a little more legwork than 8th graders on a field trip are willing to put in.

I wasn't too hung-up on this issue, though, because I had a much bigger problem on my hands: three of my boys, who had been whining and complaining about the field trip (?!?! ingrates!) since we started, had decided that wandering around the frozen tundra of the upper west side would be more enjoyable than seeing a sweet, sweet planetarium movie about stars. In other words, we had wannabe fugitives.

I spent the entire lunch period trying to convince these three to stand within a 20 foot radius of their group - much harder than it sounds, especially when you're me and your students are six-foot-tall teenage boys who are having grouchy days.

Once we got inside, and the entire planetarium was open to exploration, such wrangling became quite a bit harder. So then, in frustration and at a loss (did I mention that my supervising teacher had disappeared halfway between the school and the museum? She got off the train with two of our boys at 86th St. and met back up with us much later) and maybe kind of attempting to seem cool, I made a mistake. A pretty big one: I pulled them aside, and I explained to them that, while I HUGELY PREFERRED that they stay with their group, if they did manage to get themselves lost, they should know that we were leaving at 1:00, and they needed to be back on the train with us.

STUPID.

Of course, they took this as license to not only try to run as far away as possible, but to do it while acting as foolish as possible (i.e., running right past our group, yelling and laughing, while the rest of us waited to go into the star movie). Never try to get an 8th grader to be sneaky. I should have known this - they are always trying to be sneaky in class, with a success rate of about .017%. Some of the other teachers managed to rope them in, after which they immediately snitched on me. Serves me right, and all the other teachers were so flustered there was no lasting harm done (I hope. I guess we'll see when I get back from spring break).

Meanwhile, the star movie happened. Our kids screamed and laughed and ate their poor forgotten lunches throughout. We left right after.

We were supposed to have stayed at the museum for an extra hour or so after the movie, but when the classes of second graders at the movie behaved better than our kids (they really did), the teachers in charge decided enough was enough.

A lot of the kids - mostly girls - were upset about the early departure. They were worried about not finishing their worksheets. One even pointed out to me that no one had told them they couldn't eat in the movie. True enough. We forget sometimes that kids (and six feet tall or not, these students are kids) don't know things that we take for granted. If there was no announcement before the movie that specifically said, "Do not eat your chip-lunch during the show," they probably would have saved it, but without that warning, why not multitask?

I think if a smaller group had behaved exactly the same, they could have stayed. Having 25 misbehaving kids wandering around is a lot more manageable than 100. Even with a high teacher : student ratio (we had 7 or 8 adults, if you count me), somewhere around 60 or 70 students, you start exceeding some magical cosmic number, and control goes out the window. I only put myself in charge of three students (three highly deviant runaways, but only three), and with so many of their classmates running around, looking lost, asking for help and causing trouble, I had a heck of a time just keeping track of the trio. Other teachers had as many as 10 or 15 to watch at once.

Craziness aside, like I said, it was fun. I like the planetarium, no matter how much my kids complain, and it was nice to see them outside of class for a day, without my co-op being scary and hovering over us. I also learned some valuable lessons about the eating habits of eighth graders, average land speed of the New York 14-year-old, and why we don't put normally-separated, single-gender classes of eighth graders together in a dark room. Now I know.