By Tom White

It was a beautiful spring day in the great Pacific
Northwest; my third graders had just spent the morning meeting their pen pals
for the first time. After corresponding with them for eight months, we were at
Edmonds Beach during a really low tide, looking at all sorts of marine
creatures and getting pleasantly muddy. Now we were on the ferry, having lunch
on the sun deck with our new friends as the boat sailed across Puget Sound. We
got to the other side, disembarked and milled around on the dock, planning to
catch the same boat back so we could enjoy some more time at the beach before
returning to school.

That’s where the ferry worker found me. “Are you in charge
of this field trip?” He looked concerned.

“Theoretically,” I said. “Why, is there a problem?”

“Yes. It seems the Edmonds dock has been damaged. They need
a new part to fix it. It’ll take about five hours before we can send another
boat back across. I just thought you should know.”

No conversation about the invisible realities that affect
teachers’ lives would be complete without bringing up field trips. There’s
nothing I hate – and love – more than taking my students out into the world for
some hands-on learning.

They take an incredible amount of time.

First there’s the planning. I start by looking carefully
at what I plan to teach to figure out what, if anything, a field trip would add
to the learning. I try to do three or so trips a year; coordinated with what we’re
doing at school, scheduled around holidays, testing and assemblies. I have to
contact the location, pick a date well in advance, and then make sure my
teaching actually dovetails with the planned outing. I also have to figure out
the total cost of the trip, including transportation, minus whatever discounts
we get for being a Title One school. Then I have to work with my office manager
to schedule the bus and get the event onto the master calendar. All of that
takes a lot of time.

Once the field trip is a few weeks away, I introduce the
event to my students and send home the announcement, as well as the permission slips.
I then become an accountant. Money comes in every morning, sometimes in the
form of checks, sometimes currency and sometimes coins. I enter all of it
into a spreadsheet, gather the loot and drop it into the school safe,
along with a form which itemizes and disaggregates each check, bill and
coin. This has to happen every day. As you can imagine, this effectively consumes
my planning time for two or three weeks prior to each field trip. More
important than the money, of course, is the collection of the permission slips.
No slip, no trip. Amazingly, despite my daily haranguing, there’re always three
or four families that like to live on the edge, waiting until the night before
to sign a simple piece of paper and send it back to school.

Then there are the chaperones. We usually need five or six; sometimes
ten parents volunteer and sometimes one or two. Of course each of them needs to
turn in a “volunteer packet” ahead of time so they can get screened by the
State Patrol and approved to work with children. I get to manage that, of
course, along with assigning each chaperone to a balanced group of students. I
also need to write out directions for the volunteers, complete with my cell
phone number, a map of wherever we’re going and strict orders to not, under any
circumstances, take their students into the gift shop.

Finally, the day arrives. After a mass-stop at the restroom
(because you never know) we get on the bus, and we’re off.

And that’s when I realize that it’s all worth it. All those hours of planning, counting money and organizing volunteers pay off when we’re
out in the real world learning real stuff. I hate the work, but I love the
reward. I love the plays at the Seattle Center, the trips up the Space Needle
and the tour boats to Blake Island. I love the trips to the Sewer
Treatment Plant, the museums and the zoo. I love the aquarium, the visits to
the radio station and the Ballard Locks. 

Despite all the invisible hours each field trip entails,
it’s always worth it.

Except for that trip across Puget Sound with our pen pals.
That one was a disaster.