An issue that seems to come up every year at our school is taking students out of class for field trips. It gets to be very frustrating for a teacher to constantly have students taken out of class for various activities. Besides the problem of makeup work, teaching all students consistently the new concepts they must learn is difficult when there are a lot of days when you have students missing from each class for some activity. The other side is that activities have a positive value for the students. This is also true for carefully planned field trips.
For many years, students understood that missing school for any activity, including field trips, was a privilege and they were expected to be on their best behavior. It was also understood that misbehavior not only jeopardized each student's ability to participate, but also jeopardized the field trip/activity in the future. As a general rule, this understanding kept student behavior in check.
However, we are seeing many more instances of students bringing alcohol, drugs, tobacco on these trips along with inappropriate behavior. Too many students see this as an opportunity to get out of class and don't care about the educational value of the experience. As a former coach who also has taken students on various other activities including overnight trips, the adult supervising these activities can only do so much to oversee behavior. You have to have a certain amount of trust in the students you take. It would be great if you were never more than 20 feet away from every and all student under your charge. Obviously, this is impossible. So, you have to trust that your students will act the way they are supposed to and be dilligent in your supervision.
My question is this: If you have a group or activity that is consistently displaying inappropriate behavior, at what point do you say the educational experience is not valuable enough to continue risking the misbehavior? It would be nice to only take the well-behaved students, but that is also not possible. I have seen or heard stories about the so-called "good kids" getting into mischief or doing inappropriate behaviors. I know that there has to come a time when a teacher decides that it just isn't worth it to deal with the problems. What do the rest of you think?
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I understand your frustration. As a teacher, you go through all the planning and scheduling to give your students an amazing learning experience but what happens, you end up being completely embarrassed by your students. I had an experience 4 years ago when I took my after school students to the pumpkin patch. First, I set up two dates just incase of rain. The first date came and it was raining so I postponed the event. I had one parent go into a rage because I promised her children a field trip and took it away (totally untrue but she was not hearing any of it). One of her children came the next day and said I stole their money (the dollar I had collected so everyone could have a pumpkin). When we actually went to the pumpkin patch, I had students ripe apart the hay bales, I had students try to steal the baby pumpkins, I had students stomp on pumpkins, you name it, it happened. I will never take my after school students to the pumpkin patch again. It may seem harsh but I just cannot get myself to plan another trip again.
ReplyDeleteMy school no longer allows field trips during the day unless the field trip is a competition. We are allowed to take groups during the weekend and summer time with parent help. Sounds crazy but past experiences with the problems you named and more have pushed our county to this decision. I honestly LOVE it because I am not constantly worried about losing a child to a field trip. I hate reteaching over and over again and trying to help a student make up a grade they lost. I am thankful for my county decision.
ReplyDeleteField Trips have become a joke, it is a way to get the kids out of school and they tend to learn next to nothing while on them. I believe we have had at least 4 field trips so far and I have lost so many days of instruction. With my school's scheduling, I see kids every other day for 90 minutes. That means I see them 21/22 days out of a 9 week period. This means I must crunch everything I do into 5 or 6 day units. Take a field trip or two and those days start to fly out the window. It doesn't matter to others. However, everyone is allowed to participate, not just those who deserve it. These kids need to learn that things are privileges not rights anymore and it is disturbing that there are kids bringing contraband on these trips. However, with the state of society, there is little to no consequence for them, so why stop? They won't get arrested or thrown out of school anymore, so who cares? Sad...
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