In my own classroom I use my professional latitude comfortably and as liberally as I can. As a team leader of half of the seventh grade faculty, however, I know my educational philosophies and practices don’t necessarily rule the day; as the saying goes, “There is no ‘I’ in ‘team.'”
But while the prospect of sitting on a school bus with students for 100 miles on a single day doesn’t appeal to me any more than it does the next teacher, this week’s cancellation of my team’s April field trip to a nearby national park left me rather seething.
We’d been talking as a team about the trip since the beginning of the school year–I don’t even remember who proposed it–and the science teacher and a math teacher had already spent a Sunday afternoon driving around the park researching locations where students could write about their sensory observations in nature, take a scavenger hunt to learn about the history of the park and the Civilian Conservation Corps, and map a coordinate plane; students had already brought in permission forms; parents had already offered small donations toward the trip and/or signed up to be chaperons.
The “reasons” for the cancellation, and my analysis:
1. Money: Totally not legit. As quite a few students declined to sign up for our end-of-the-year “educational” blowout trip to an out-of-state amusement park, we calculated that most of our team’s available funds were claimed by empty seats on the charter buses. As I told my team, though, I was sure I could find more money to support the national park trip–we only needed $300 or $400–but they said they still didn’t want to go (see the second “reason”).
Not one hour later, when my principal found out we had empty seats on the amusement park charter buses, he said, “Oh, let me see if I can get some other faculty to go; I have some available money [my emphasis] to pay their way.” Even more frustrating was the fact that when the teacher counting student tickets to the amusement park recounted, she found she’d overlooked a few, which meant there was never any financial shortage after all.
2. Snow days: All the more reason to make the trip. We’ve had ten–five of them in March–which has cut our days to impact students’ lives. Other teachers seemed more concerned, though, at the loss of time in the classroom to prepare for the state’s damn tests. Even if those tests were important to the learning of our students–as I think they are not–the one other person on my team who really wanted the trip to happen correctly pointed out, “Just because we’re on a field trip doesn’t mean students can’t learn or review something that is going to be tested.”
Furthermore, some planning work for the field trip did remain, and seemed to be causing stress for the science teacher in particular. I didn’t think the activities had to be anything too demanding planning wise, but she felt she needed to return to the park to prep, and she wasn’t sure when she would do that, since over our week-long spring break she was going to be on a cruise.
I can’t say the cancellation was a complete surprise. Several times in the planning process I had occasionally sensed passive resistance: concerns about student safety on hikes (we implemented a plan for that); one teacher said buses exacerbate her motion sickness (we decided she could drive her own car; she is, however, going to be okay on the amusement park charter buses, as long as she sits in a front seat. School buses have front seats, too, by the way.); another teacher had some sort of previously scheduled dentist appointment or something (unchangeable, apparently, even six months in advance, when we established the field trip date). On these occasions I had explicitly asked, “Do we want to make this trip?” and the team’s consensus was always a clear “Yes.”
As the trip disintegrated, however, I decided not to stick to my team-leader guns. Forcing begrudged cooperation from teachers dead set against an activity would be a sure precipitate for field-trip-day-induced sick leave.
And so just as I had headed up organizing the trip I graciously headed up its nonoccurrence, and counted myself educated: Next time I want to offer my students a truly educational opportunity, I may need to go it alone.
There is, after all, no “I” in “team.”