Parentella

This is the time of year when every teacher can tell you exactly what is good about getting out, but I’m not talking about teachers. Students are my focus, specifically students who lack experiential learning.

Those students are often children from inner cities, but more and more of them are showing up in rural and even suburban areas.

A story in the New York Times about a principal and her students being hurt by the Race to the Top rules made me rethink my view of field trips. My previous position was that I totally dislike them.

From my teacher point of view they require additional planning, additional paperwork, often a long ride in an uncomfortable school bus, and additional risk. Because of a student drowning just before the end of the school year just past and its preventability, the risks have been foremost in my mind.

But like I said, this is not about teachers.

From the student point of view, field trips are, at worst, a day out of the classroom. Paradoxically, having a day out of the classroom may also be the best thing about field trips. If I haven’t already made it clear here or in my personal blog, I love teaching but I am not a big fan of classrooms or school buildings.

I am not a fan because I believe that for a great many students being in a classroom all day actually interferes with learning.

The students I teach know a lot. They know poverty, they know hip hop, they know sneakers and labels, they know that a lot of what we try to teach them in school will not make the slightest difference in their lives even if they learn it. They know that for many of them their lives will not be so different from the lives their parent’s have led. This is not a good thing.Many of my students have not been out of their neighborhood in the Bronx until we take them out on school trips.

I grew up in NYC. I went to NYC public schools, but my education was very different from the education these students are getting.

It has nothing to do with the schools being better or worse. They were pretty oppressive places 40 years ago and they still are.

The difference is not in what happens in school, but in what happens outside of it. When I was twelve, in 1965, the world was safer. My mother worked and wasn’t home when I came home after school, but she also wasn’t overly worried when I walked out the door again to play or do politics with my friends.

Just like I did when I was their age, most of the 12-year-olds I teach go home to empty apartments after school, but where I was allowed, even encouraged to go out and explore the city, they are forbidden to leave. When my father would take us on Saturday or Sunday he often took us to the Museum of Natural History, or MOMA or the Met.

When they are part of their lives at all, my student’s fathers work extra jobs to put food on the table or buy those sneakers so important to their child’s self-image. We were poor but my parents had high expectations for their four children and filled our lives with music, art, books, discussion and ideas.

My students get almost none of that.

That is where field trips come in.

Field trips are supposed to have educational purpose and on the form I fill out to request permission to take them on a trip ask what it is? I am always tempted to write “to get them out of school.” After all, that is my reason for the trip.

I want to show them that there are other ways to live beyond their Bronx neighborhood, that there are things to do and see. I want to expose them to art, music, architecture and different social situations.

I want to give them experiences that their parents can’t, not because they don’t want to or don’t care about their children’s learning, but because they don’t know these things exist either and even if they do, lack the time or money to take them.

It is not seeing the piece of art, music or architecture that is important; it is exposing them to the idea that there is art, music and architecture beyond their limited scope of experience.

Here is why I know this is important to do.

Next year I will be teaching F. He is a rough-looking, often taciturn (even more than most teenagers) youth of 13. This past year I learned that F, often a disruptive presence in class, is a talented self-taught piano player. He plays classical music, jazz, show tunes and rock, all without ever having a lesson. His parents are not musicians. Dad is in jail and mom works three cleaning jobs.

He has no piano at home. But he taught himself to play.

According to him, it all started when his 4th grade class took a field trip for a backstage tour of Lincoln Center and learned about the different instruments in a symphony orchestra. There was a piano in the room and F went to it and hit a couple of keys.

His teacher told him to stop, but a musician happened to be in the room and sat down next to F and played.

The next time F got near a piano, a run-down badly tuned one in school, he sat down, played with the keys for a few minutes, and started to compose a song.

From then on, he took advantage of every chance he got, in school, on trips, in church or any other way, to put his hands on the keyboard and play. He said he had to be pulled away from the piano because he would never stop playing.

F is smart, but not in a school way; he doesn’t really connect to what happens in the classroom. He’s already told me he hates social studies and his social studies teacher from last year said that was very evident in her class.
I think this year will be different. I’ve already told F that I’m going to ask him to write a song for every social studies topic we study. He’s sent me three emails since school ended three weeks ago, each one asking if I’m serious. Today I got another email from him. This time he asked for a list of the topics on the 8th grade syllabus. I think he might perform his final exam on the first day of school. F had his first paying gig last month when he played at our school’s graduation. He made $20. He made another $50 playing at a graduation party afterwards.

F has never had a pair of whatever sneakers are hot at the moment. His clothes are clean but never look new. But those things don’t matter to F. He’s saving his money to buy a piano. All because of a field trip.