The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Field Trips

Saturday, June 6, 2009

Field Trips

On Thursday, I chaperoned my daughter's field trip to one of those colonial villages where people walk around dressed like colonists and we carry a list of 156 detailed questions (euphemistically termed "a scavenger hunt") to be answered in one hour and fifty three minutes. Aside from the fact that history always reminds me that I am glad I live in the present, here is what I learned:

1. We do not live in South Jersey like everyone says. If we live in South Jersey, we live in the northern regions of it because Cape May and its ferry are a long bus ride away. It is twice as long on the way home after the purchase of harmonicas, pop guns, and shrill trainstop whistles. I mean, really, did colonists have trains? Wasn't that more around Lincoln's time? I thought they were big on horses.

2.A bus load of ten year olds, a warmly humid day and the odor of warming milk create symptoms of panic in me.

3.Somebody will get freaked out by the muskets, graves, and villages of cobwebs spun in the rafters. Unfortunately, on this trip, it was me. I even started wondering if the people dressed up as printers and book binders weren't reincarnations of old souls. After that thought, I told the kids it was time to break for lunch.

4. Fifth graders function under watchful eyes in much the same manner as prisoners do. They have their own hierarchy of power, a complicated bartering system, and they communicate silently via their DS's.

5. My daughter has no respect for assumed authority. I was standing there in the drizzle, frantically trying to answer the questions on the scavenger hunt when she said to me,"Mom, just put it down. They never check that stuff. They just put it in the recycle bin."

6. There is always one "career" mother on the trip who spends the entire time texting or consulting her Blackberry while her group scatters into the roped off areas and goes to feed the ducks despite all the warning signs NOT to feed them. Their freedom causes mighty dissension in the more attended groups.

7. My daughter and I have totally different perspectives about field trips. On the way back, I kept asking her and her friends questions about what she had learned.

"Moooommmm," she groaned, "we like field trips because we don't have to do any work." Her fellow inmates cheered this statement.

I do wonder if kids learn anything during these pricey excursions. Maybe I just don't see what they are learning, but I do know the most excitement was conjured during our time in the gift shop. (My daughter spent her entire allotment on colonial candy)

I think history is hard to get across; I couldn't abide it in school. I learned history by reading novels set during certain time periods. I still can't think of the Civil War without thinking of Scarlett, Melanie and the red soil of Tara. So how do you teach kids history without force feeding them?

11 comments:

Bish Denham said...: I think, once the kids get older, maybe even into adulthood, they will remember the time they went on that neat field trip and saw a reenactment of history. Something of what they experienced that day may trigger a desire to learn more later on.

I don't know if there's a way to inspire a curiosity to learn about history, except to say that as long as we don't learn from our past we are doomed to repeat it. Obviously we have not yet learned how to live peacefully with each other as we still go to war and commit crimes against each other.

As for me I always loved history. Particularly ancient Roman and Greek history. I was so into I knew names and dates of battles, generals, kings...all sorts of stuff. I also had some very exciting history teachers who managed, through lectures no less, to connect moments together a way that made it clear how one thing can and does lead to another.

Of course, I've forgotten more than I remember, but I still love history. And I don't think becoming interesting in the Civil War through reading Gone With the Wind is a bad thing at all.; Sunday, 07 June, 2009
Christy Raedeke said...: My daughter (3rd grade) had a field trip on Friday during which most bus communictaion happened via their linked Nintendo DS handhelds.

Clearly someone needs to come up with a Nintendo "Colonial Williamsburg" game where you have to learn wheelwrighting, metalsmithing, wigmaking, etc. without starving or dying from an infected wound...; Sunday, 07 June, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: So the field trips are like seeds, Bish? That makes me feel like schools really aren't wasting tons of money. I think you're right on this, too.

We had worksheets in history, and lots and lots of maps. I can't stand maps - really, just ask my husband who reminds me that if I can write a novel, I can surely read a map. I have a kind of map dyslexia. It makes for some truly random moments during road trips.
But yeah, teachers should be able to ignite the kids who aren't lucky enough to have an inborn desire to learn history.

Yup, Christy, those Nintendo DS's. It's exactly like tween texting.; Sunday, 07 June, 2009
Mary Witzl said...: Ahh....I come to this blog for a big dose of sanity -- and to be entertained, and I always get what I came for! We had those power moms too and I wouldn't have minded flushing their blackberries down the toilets.

I have a sure-fire way to teach history. Look up whatever the subject is that you want to teach on Wikipedia or similar, wait until your kids are in the room, standing near you, then flick off quickly, letting them get just a fascinating peek. If they ask what you were looking at, tell them it was something they're not quite ready for yet. I've taught my kids all sorts of interesting history this way.

And I'm a big fan of Horrible Histories, too. My kids have taught ME a whole bunch of history through Horrible Histories.; Sunday, 07 June, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: Sanity? That makes me feel great, since that's not a word ascribed to us too often. Just ask the neighbors...

So make history kind of like a forbidden fruit? That would definitely entice my kids. I'll have to try your strategies.; Monday, 08 June, 2009
Adrienne said...: Last year I went on a zoo field trip, and we had one of those scavenger hunt assignments. We ran around at an insane pace trying to complete it (there was a candy prize involved) and barely had the chance to actually see animals.

As for learning history, I think my kids are doing better than I was. I just crammed for tests and then promptly forgot everything. I did like those epic movies, but that was mainly because we got out of doing boring timelines.; Tuesday, 09 June, 2009
K.C. Shaw said...: I don't remember most of the field trips I went on as a kid, except the amazing one to Biltmore House when I was in ninth grade. Oh, and the zoo. Heck, I don't even really remember the field trips I helped chaperon while student teaching.

I never had any interest in history until college, and then it was only because I happened to take a history course from the most amazing professor ever. I took everything else he taught and ended up minoring in history--if he'd taught more classes, I could have majored. His classes shouldn't have been interesting because he just stood there and lectured (and got testy if someone interrupted with a question), but his lectures were full of fascinating details--but not details for the sake of trivia, details that made everything just come alive. I don't know that you could do that for younger kids, though. I don't think they have the attention span.

(Hi, by the way; you commented on my blog so I dropped by and immediately snorted coke--er, coca-cola--through my nose at the squirrels with lightsabers. Thanks!); Tuesday, 09 June, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: Those scavenger hunts completely ruin the trips. I asked why the kids couldn't come back and just write a journal entry about what they saw - what impressed them, what was unusual, something along those lines rather than, "How many boats brought iron ore to Cape May in 1854?"

I had English professors like that, KC. I never touched history in college which says a whole lot of bad stuff about my high school.

And I know -- squirrels with light sabers. How could anyone resist? I love that one.; Tuesday, 09 June, 2009
Anonymous said...: Hi Anne,

Thank you for answering my questions about your book. When is the next one coming out?

-Megan Albitt; Tuesday, 09 June, 2009
Katie Anderson said...: I loved the line,"her inmates cheered," and "Moom, no one checks this, just toss it in the recycle bin."

Lawsy, I can not answer your question because I detested history and still kinda do - unless I'm watching some delicious period film.

I'm gonna think on this.; Wednesday, 10 June, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: Hi Megan,

Book #2 is due out in February, 2010. Thanks for asking!

I know, Katie. I learned all my history though reading period novels. I guess my real worry is my kids sort of "inherited" my lack of natural interest in history. I have to be really lured.; Wednesday, 10 June, 2009

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Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

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Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

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Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

***