By Kate Doak, Staff Writer
FIELD TRIPS: They’re just as important for high school students.
Almost every American student who attended a public elementary school knows the joy of a field trip. The liberty of being freed from the box called classroom and the knowledge gained from hands-on experience always make for an educational and exciting school day. If these trips are so wonderful, though, why are they an endangered form of learning in high schools? Shouldn’t schools and parents want to give their children the most well-rounded education possible? While there are a few minor roadblocks on the way, a successful field trip is always possible.
To fully appreciate a field trip and be willing to work for it, one needs to understand the importance of this educational tool. In elementary school, field trips were typical. Most students, no matter what school, went to similar places at similar times: an aquarium, the tar pits, a zoo, a mission or a museum. These specific trips are taken at specific times because they help students learn more about the subject they are currently studying in class. Reading a textbook and looking at pictures on a slide during a lecture will put the information into the open, but there is no guarantee students will retain that information. In a more hands-on and explorative environment, it is proven that students learn more information and learn it more eagerly.
Well, if young children go to aquariums and zoos, what trips would interest them once they go into high school? Museum visits, whether they be history- or art-based, are always relevant in a high schooler’s education. More specific trips, however, can be even more helpful for the students. Trips based on specific classes or career interests can get even the laziest teenager to participate. This works so well because students are not being talked to sleep by a cookie-cutter lecture and missing information that could be important and actually interesting. On a field trip the subject matter is staring the student in the face, the lesson being a teacher in itself. Field trips like this can include trips to specific and places that relate to certain subjects and activities, like a school paper could visit the local newspaper or the typical art class could visit a local artist’s studio. Students could also take trips to colleges and businesses to broaden their horizons and open their eyes to degrees and careers they did not know much about before. Field trips can give students a lot of information about things that they often don’t learn enough about in the classroom.
One would think that if field trips were so wonderful and helpful, they would occur all the time. Wrong. As much as students, and frequently teachers, yearn for learning experience away from the confines of the concrete box that makes a classroom, there some issues that make school administrations and school districts weary, the biggest issues being funding and transportation. However, there are many ways to get around these problems. Take the annual Poly Art History Field trip to the LACMA art museum. The trip receives no school funding, being paid for entirely by the students and their families. 25 dollars pays for a round trip ticket on the train from Downtown Riverside to L.A. as well as the bus and subway that take students and chaperons directly to the museum gates. With a fair amount of chaperons and plenty of willing students, the trip went well, transportation and all, without and financial help with the school. Understandably, not everyone can afford a field trip like this, which is where a class could hold a fundraiser, one that could even relate to the subject itself. It’s not just Art History that takes trips, however. Trips to different parts of Europe happen almost every summer chaperoned by specific teachers who feel field trips, especially long term ones, can be a vital source of learning for any student.