Most recently I took a trip to Crystal River, FL with a group of 6 boys and 9 girls from my school. Like another school I've worked at, this school takes trips to various locations and approaches education from a different perspective. Some schools call it a Week without Walls, we just call it Winterim. The focus of our group was to travel to Florida and learn something about conservation of the environment while swimming with manatees. (It's a rough life, I gotta tell ya!)
The details of the trip are too vast to go into with just a single post but the entire experience made me feel very lucky for what I get to do with my life. I am a teacher and being around young adults can be enriching in so many ways. They bring so much to my life that it is hard to quantify just what it does for my soul. Teachers often say that the job pays more than just a salary and that definitely is the case. I am fortunate in that my profession brings me joy on almost a daily basis and my wrinkles from smiling have only increased since I started working at this school. Swimming with manatees was a very cool thing to do, something that I've not experienced before and it was amazing to be able to do so. But the jewel in the crown for me was not being able to scratch the back of a 800 lb. mammal but the interactions I had with the 15 students that I shared the experience with. Just a few of the moments that I have stuck in my mind include:
A group of 4 playful girls who ransacked the boys' bedroom and put chocolate syrup on the toilet seat in the boys' bathroom - all with teacher (mine) permission, of course.
Watching a small group of kids fish in the Crystal River. Kids who had never fished before and then seeing what they caught that day - two baby crabs and a horde of mosquito bites.
Helping various groups make meals for the days we were there. Some meals were fabulous while others were merely filling (none were bad, just some were better than others). Grilling steaks and burgers, baking chocolate chip cookies, frying up eggs and bacon, spraying whipped cream on to ice cream sundaes.
Finding them passed out from exhaustion in various positions throughout the house. A personal favorite is a 16 year-old boy who was curled up in the fetal position with a spoon of chocolate chip cookie dough in his hand. Priceless...
Jumping into a non-heated swimming pool and hearing the expletive as soon as his head rose above the water. I guess he didn't think of what 64 F (17 C) water would feel like on the skin.
Our last night before returning to ABQ, seeing the girls wrestle the boys and not backing down. Rug burns be damned, those kids had some fun. And I laughed the whole time it was happening.
I am reminded of the final scene from A Field of Dreams when James Earl Jones' character talks about why not to sell the property and keep the field. He says that people will visit and "the memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces." That's how I feel about dealing with students sometimes, they leave me with indelible memories that I will keep for a lifetime.
