If you’ve ever gone on a field trip, (which is very likely) you remember the joy of the teacher handing out permission slips and announcing the opportunity of a field trip in the coming weeks. And then losing your mind for the next several weeks or maybe that was just me. Is there anything more exciting than a field trip? I think I could get married and still remember my trip to Ship Island better.
You get a permission slip with a little stamp in the corner and enough body text for you to just properly sell your soul or something without noticing, and a dotted line at the bottom for your parents to sign away any chance of death, sickness, or heat exhaustion.
Now at MSA, we just send in money or just sign up to pay the fee, but back then it was a big deal! Especially if you had ADHD and being responsible for your own permission slip was your own personal 7th circle but I’m sure that’s a very niche experience.
Then, they would take you all out of class (except for the kids whose parents didn’t let them go,) and line you up to get situated into separate buses: 50 kids to a bus each. All crammed into a small metal container with leather seats and no proper ventilation. And then you stay like that for an hour and thirty minutes.
Annually, one kid tries to see how fast they can get the bus turned around before their teacher snaps at them. Last 15 minutes of the ride or so, they (the teachers) stand up despite the fact you’re not supposed to do that and mention you’re REPRESENTING THE SCHOOL SO NO FUNNY BUSINESS before they let you loose. Some kid would get lost, some kid would puke up the school lunch because bugs crawled in it, the teachers would force the rest to throw out the school lunches, it was an experience!
Possibly the grimiest experience of your life but an experience!
If you’re lucky, the field trip lasts the entire day, but most of the time you’re back by 1:15 pm (to make time for the bus ride back). One kid will presumably go home with their parents because they live in the area while the rest of you get to finalize the day by sleeping in terrible leather seats until the bus pulls back into the school (or the bus driver runs something over.)
and then no one in the school ever stops talking about it. the end!
Yep, those were the days.
Rushing to the back of the school bus seat back then should have been an Olympic sport.
I love field trips. Mainly because to me they were a ticket to getting out of school for the day, but that was elementary school. In middle school all the field trips I went on were educational and we had to take notes most of the time.