Big Trip

Tomorrow morning, Sam is going to fly to London.  I’m  amazed at this, because he’s only in 5th grade.

He’s going with a group of kids from his school.  There will be 2 or 3 teachers as chaperones, they will stay with an English family (in groups of 3).  They will see lots of cool stuff, in one of the world’s extremely cool cities.  If you’re tired of London, you’re tired of life, they say.  It’s a bit like Prague that way, except massively bigger.

Oh, yeah, they’re going to ride the big wheel

We sure never had any cool field trips like that when I was in school.  I’m a little bit envious, but I’m also really glad that my kids are going to school here, and not in the States, where they are seriously talking about having armed guards in the schools.

Someone asked me today (the lady who was cutting my hair) if students in the Czech Republic are different than students in the U.S.  I replied, diplomatically I hope, that I can’t really say because I wasn’t a teacher when I lived in the States.  Also, my experience as a student is of questionable relevance since it was over 40 years ago.  I’m not sure exactly which things are different because it’s a different country and which things are different because it’s a different world.

There are a couple of things I like about Czech schools, though.  They do take a lot of cool trips.  It’s not just London.  They’re off to the theater, or some museum, or a petting zoo at the drop of a hat.  They have družina.  I don’t  even know how to translate that  into English.  It means the kids can stay after school, there’s a play area, it’s supervised but just barely.  It’s great for working parents and it’s a lot of fun for the kids, too.  And then, they’ve got škola v přirodě, which is a bit of a misnomer.  It means nature school (well, literally, school in nature) but it’s not like scouts or anything.  They sleep indoors, they have classes, but it’s a trip out of Prague, they’re gone about a week, and there’s a lot more fun time than during their regular school days.

I don’t think that Czech students are really much different from American students.  My  1st graders run around the room like cats on cocaine, my 3rd graders do not understand the meaning of “take out a piece of paper and a pen,” and my 9th graders are completely clear about their determination to remain as pig ignorant as possible, but I suspect that is true on both continents, and has been in every generation.