Field Trip

It's sad, but I haven't been able to plan that many field trips since I started teaching.  I've taken students on more than a few - we had them every month when I was a humble kindergarten teacher in Korea - but the truth is that the international schools I've worked for as an art teacher have discouraged me from taking kids out of school.

They had their reasons, of course.  For example, last year the schedule was such that classes met 1-3 times a week, depending on the class.  When you don't get much time to work with your students, every moment counts, and you really don't want to give up even one period with a class.  However, as sad as it is for me that I haven't planned that many field trips, it's even sadder that some of my kids haven't been on even one field trip.  When I found that out earlier this year, I decided I was going to have to do something about that.  It wasn't hard, really - our principal this year is very supportive and there are lots of galleries in town, and there was even a pretty justifiable reason for taking them out of school - to get them thinking about our own show, which will happen in a couple of months.

Several of the kids said that they had never been to an art gallery, which I found incredibly sad (there are enough galleries around in UB that it's not like there's no opportunity).  They really seemed to enjoy the ones we went to, and most seemed to put thought into the questions I asked in their booklet, although I think they were a little over it by the time we got to the last one (after lunch). 

I was hoping for really nice weather - we finally made it above zero Celsius last week, but the snow on Tuesday cooled it back down.  We walked between the Union of Mongolian Artists and the Mongolian National Modern Art Gallery, and then from there to the Blue Mon building - the second tallest building in the background) where lunch and our third gallery (the Blue Moon) awaited.  Luckily it was sunny and the wind had blown off most of the pollution.

My last field trip involved trying to take my homeroom last year to a street art festival.  It turned into a huge fail.  It wasn't my fault - I'd talked to the organizer and done everything I could to make sure it worked out, but it still feels like it's your fault when things don't go the way they're supposed to.  At lunch one of my girls remarked on how well-organized everything was, and that made me feel wonderful.  We had a little problem with the fact that the bus wasn't where it was supposed to be, and didn't have enough seats for us (note to self: make sure the bus has the middle, fold-down seats next time!) but otherwise things went well.  Our office Wonder Woman called the first gallery and got them to let us come in and see the show that they were still putting up, and organized the reservation at the hot pot restaurant (which most of the kids seemed to be able to find something to eat at - some eating so much that it actually hurt to breathe ;-)  I believe I'm going to have to organize some more trips in the near future, especially because my 9th and 10th grade class (which has a lot of my homeroom kids from last year) felt a little slighted that instead of their regularly scheduled art class they got art as taught by their math teacher, which is nowhere near as fun.