The Field Trip from Hell

Well, I've had two vodka cranberries and I guess I can venture to tell about the field trip from Hell. Said field trip took place on Thursday (see...it took two whole days before I felt like talking about it.) We took five second grade classes into the city for an hour-long program on insects, arachnids and snakes. We split up the planning work for the field trip between the five of us (in theory, a good idea--in practice, not so much). The first *#)%&#! hitch was when I took my five "school lunchers" to get their lunches out of the box only to find that in this district, the kids pick up their lunches before they get on the bus (rather than the cafeteria boxing it all up and giving it to the teacher who in charge of lunches). Everyone else knew this. I hate being new. There's nothing that will make you feel like an ass ruin your day like having five hungry kids with no lunch on a field trip. Teachers and parents offered up their own yogurt and spare apple before someone ran to Seven-Eleven for some Lunchables.

Next was the transportation debacle. Apparently "return time" means the time you get back to school, not the time you leave the museum. It seems very obvious in retrospect. I'm not sure what we were thinking when we filled out the transportation form. Fortunately, this screw-up wasn't mine alone. The bad part is that we had to leave the program 20 minutes early. Some kids didn't get to hold the giant snake and their parents are pissed.

At least I had nothing to do with the wreck on the interstate. Now don't worry, we weren't involved in the wreck. We were just parked for forty minutes with 110 second graders in the Nevada desert. Have you ever heard someone pray, "Dear God, please let no one have to go to the bathroom"? I actually asked a girl to QUIT drinking water. By the time the kids ran out of songs to sing I was wishing I had chosen a different career. You've not heard "The Star Spangled Banner" until you've heard it sung by a busful of 8 year-olds. I guess we could have stayed the extra 20 minutes at the museum. We got back to school an hour after dismissal and had to check kids out one by one to avoid losing any of them in the shuffle. The last of them left at quarter to five.

It's possible that from now on my field trips will consist of a bag of popcorn and Google Earth projected onto my classroom wall.