When I was in 5th grade, we went on a field trip to the now-defunct Naval Training Center in San Diego, which was where the Navy did basic training at the time. It was an all-school trip and I think there were a couple other elementary schools there on that day too, so our class had to spend quite a bit of time waiting on a large lawn in between the events and things we would get to see. During one of those breaks our teacher arranged a game of “steal the bacon” - the class sits in a circle, divided down the middle into two teams, and in each round the two kids sitting opposite each other get up and run to grab a towel (the “bacon”) in the middle of the circle, and the kid who grabs it first has to run back to their spot before the other kid tags them.
When it was my turn, the boy opposite myself and I ran at the bacon at breakneck speed - and ran right into each other, head-first, and knocked each other out.
I was unconscious for probably a few seconds and blinded for a few minutes after I came to, and I probably suffered a concussion, but I could hear my friends cheering, and I was somehow able to follow their voices and crawl back to my spot and claim the point for my team. I don’t really remember much else from that day. I don’t think I got any proper medical attention afterward, either.
When I was in first grade, one of my classmates lived on a working farm. We had a field trip out to his family’s farm, on a rainy day. All that I remember was everything was muddy and smelled bad. Totally normal for a farm on a rainy day, but not at all enjoyable for a six year old kid from the suburbs.
When I was in fifth grade, in 1976, we had a field trip to a movie theater, along with a bunch of kids around our same age from other area schools, to watch the movie musical 1776. It was supposed to be ostensibly educational, given that it was the Bicentennial year, but it wound up just being a long and boring movie that a bunch of 11 year olds had difficulty following. The only things I remember from it was (a) Thomas Jefferson telling John Adams and Benjamin Franklin that he was “taking his wife back to bed,” rather than working on writing the Declaration of Independence, and (b) Caesar Rodney wore a bandage on his face because he had cancer.
A field trip in second grade was billed as a “trip to the circus”. We got to the Forum in Inglewood at 9am where the “Greatest Show on Earth” was setting up and handed over to the venue’s facility manager for a tour. He apparently knew nothing about circuses and anything concerning the circus other than a quick peek at the deserted three rings was closed off to us (I think I heard an elephant bellow in the distance). The manager regaled us with every detail of how you turn a basketball court into a hockey rink and then returned us to the bus. We were back in class hours before the circus’ first performance of the day.
Elementary school: field trip to the zoo. Partway through, the cutest girl in class makes a big deal about getting sick to her stomach — explaining that the stench of zoo-animal poop is overpowering.
I didn’t yet know the word ‘melodramatic’, but I figured that’s what she was being; after all, the stench of zoo-animal poop wasn’t that potent. Then I thought: why am I pondering how potent the zoo-animal poop stench is? It’s the stench of zoo-animal poop! You don’t evaluate the stench of zoo-animal poop; you MOVE AWAY from it! I’d rather be back in the classroom than taking a field trip CLOSER TO the stench of zoo-animal poop!
In second grade we went to The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI. It’s a great museum, but I had a hard time enjoying it because I knew there was an upstairs area, which I was dreading because I was afraid of stairs at the time.
We did the upstairs part at the end of the trip, and I came back down the stairs very slowly and cautiously. So slow, that when I finally got to the first floor my class was nowhere to be seen.
At first I ran around panicky, looking everywhere through the crowd for a familiar face. But when I eventually accepted that I was on my own, I knew what to do. I went to the main entrance where a couple security guards were and calmly said “I’m lost”. One guard went to get help while the other one stayed there with me. I remember he was drinking a strawberry milkshake and offered it to me, saying “you want a slug of this, kid?” I said no thank you.
Turned out they skipped or botched the head count and the school bus had left without me! I had to wait for quite awhile before a couple teachers in a station wagon came back to pick me up.
We had a high school Spanish teacher who, in retrospect, was both amazingly skilled and hypomanic. (Now, you have to memorize this list of types of trees and shrubs… Not too many people who learn a foreign language are tested on words like elm, oak, hickory, juniper or spruce… The amount of vocabulary she taught was really quite impressive.)
Our town at that time was pretty “white bread” and did not have a large Hispanic population.
We rode the school bus across town to visit… Taco Bell. The only one in town. Our teacher made us order in Spanish, which the gringo teenagers working behind the counter could not understand. Quisiera dos tacos supreme, por favor.. On the plus side, they did have churros. Thankfully, next year we went to the good Mexican restaurant in town.
We went to the Ford Museum (and Edison’s workshop) on a great grade eight field trip. It seemed quite exotic to travel to another country. I remember being quite fascinated by the bottle purportedly containing Edison’s last breath. Kept picturing Ford holding the bottle to Edison!s face. “Was that it?”, he asked, after mistakenly capturing a penultimate effort…
I was once on the teaching end of medical student field trips to the morgue, as part of pathology class. As in the photo below, we’d set out dissected organ specimens to illustrate disease processes.
Occasionally field trips to the morgue backfire, as in a Staten Island high school excursion awhile back.
“Classmates of a 17-year-old boy who lost his life in a horrific car crash discovered a gruesome scene during a field trip to the morgue: The dead student’s brain.”
“Jesse Shipley died when the car he was in collided with an SUV in January 2005…Two months later, Shipley’s classmates in the forensic-science club at Port Richmond High School took a field trip to the morgue and found the boy’s brain floating in a glass jar with a label that clearly identified the organ as his, according to court records.”
On occasion, such outings have been used as part of a “scared straight” program. This one generated a lawsuit by the bereaved family.
Yes, i remember the bottle containing Edison’s last breath making a big impression on me too as a kid. That’s part of Greenfield Village, an old-timey village adjoining the museum, also containing buildings like the Wright Brother’s bicycle shop, complete with a replica of their plane being built in back.
Despite getting lost and left behind at the museum when I was 7, I have many fond memories of the museum and the village, right up to being a father taking my own kids there. It’s a shame that it’s all the legacy of a virulent anti-Semite, but I don’t think that takes away from the excellence of the museum and grounds today.
The upstairs area used to be an exhibit of Henry Ford’s life. It was closed to the public several years ago and converted to offices. The entire museum was revamped about the same time and many other artifacts were sold at auction. (Such as Edsel Ford’s Bugatti.)
Here’s the story.
If you ever do get back to the adjacent Greenfield Village, check out the Heintz House. It appears to be closed, but the last time I was there it was actually open. The exhibits had not been refreshed in many years - and actually made for a good exhibit of how the Village display their wares.
The summer before sixth grade (1981ish), Mom signed me up for a two-week summer program for “gifted” kids at a (now-defunct) college in Jacksonville, IL. One of the selling points was to be an archaeological dig, but for reasons I’m not clear on they switched it out at the last minute and replaced it with a visit to the town of Nauvoo. It was indescribably hot, I’m not a Mormon, and I grew up within feet of New Salem, which is basically exactly the same thing only without the religion.
In the humorous book “Pagan Babies and Other Catholic Memories”, the author, Gina Cascone, wrote of a field trip to Washington D.C.
“After we did the Capitol and the White House and drove past the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, we took a vote on what to do next – the Smithsonian or the religious wax museum. The vote came out eighteen for the Smithsonian, four for the religious wax museum. …we went to the wax museum.”
Went to a commercial bakery that made cookies and crackers. At some point of the tour, we heard a crash of metal and someone hollering. We then saw a couple people walking someone else with a blood soaked rag wrapped around his hand. We were diverted to another part of the factory, we never heard what happened. Some of the students were upset over what we saw so instead of giving everyone a small pack of cookies, we were given bigger packs. I still remember getting a pack of fig cookies that didn’t taste very good. I thought they would be like Fig Newtons which I loved, these were dry and chewy.
It was perfectly fine so far as local zoos went- and I do like animals- plus it was only a few miles from the school, and there was a footpath, so they didn’t have to hire a minibus or anything, we could just walk there.
The only issue was that my parents owned it. I already spent all my out-of-school hours there, including being there that morning before being driven to school.
