Sloan Semester

When I was a kid, I used to love high school field trips. Who doesn’t? School trips were a great chance to get away for the day. It was an excellent deal. You wouldn’t have to do any work all day, and all you would usually have to do in return was to write a little report. Of course, being a geek made me enjoy them all the more. After all, the school trips would always be to interesting and educational destinations. We would get to go to science centers, to the art museum, to local landmarks, and many other places.

Of course, my favorite school field trip of all was to Arkona. It was a giant fossil Park in Canada, and every school class would get to go there in 6th grade. It was pretty amazing. There were trilobites you could grab out of the mud while you were walking by. There were fossilized animals everywhere. Not only was it educational, but it also gave us the opportunity to collect and trade interesting looking artifacts. Kids all love collecting things, and it can be a lot of fun to trade with your friends.

In high school, I liked the school trips even more. They were less frequent of course, but when we got to go they were a lot of fun. My favorite were the school musical tours. I was part of both the band and choir, so as you can imagine I got to travel quite a bit. Going to concerts at other schools was fun, but the best was when we toured Europe. We got to go all over, singing with other choirs from other countries. It was amazing to be able to share our songs with music lovers all over the world.

I’ve always thought it would be nice to see school trips more integrated into the educational curriculum. Usually, when we would take a school trip it was more of an escape than an educational opportunity. Don’t get me wrong – I learned things on the school field trips, but mostly it was just an excuse to have fun and socialize with my friends. It was never really done to illustrate something we were learning in history for example, or to explain a principle of science. I feel like, with the amount of fun we had leaving the school, they could have gotten us to do some serious work.