Tuesday, May 20, 2008

You Know What? Just Get Rid Of Field Trips

There's no way to win. If kids have sex while on the field trip, the parents raise a stink at the punishment. If chaperones try to keep the kids honest, you get idiocy like this:

MILLBURY, Ohio - Parents have complained to a northwest Ohio school board that a chaperone sealed students in their hotel rooms with duct tape during a high school choir field trip.

At a heated meeting Monday, Michelle Mata told the Lake Local school board in Millbury that the tactic panicked her son during a recent weekend trip to Chicago.

Sylvia Keeler said she may file charges. Her son, Mark Hummel, said he worried he could be trapped during a fire...

Schools Superintendent Jim Witt said the tape would show if students violated curfew but wouldn't have kept them from escaping in an emergency.


Sneak out, break the tape "barrier", and you can't put the tape back in place when you try to sneak back in. I'd say it's pretty ingenious. Maybe a bit overboard, but not dangerous or out-of-bounds.

And the high school student who worried about his safety in such a situation? He's a wussie.

You know what? If kids can't behave themselves on field trips, just don't take them anymore. Let all learning take place in a classroom, from a book. The hassle of field trips is more than I want to put up with.

6 comments:

  1. Anonymous5:14 PM

    i think it was a very smart thing for the parent to do as long as it was just one strip of tape.

    and my guess...ya the student is a panzy, or the parents are in need of pressing charges for dumb things just to get their debt paid off

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  2. My god are we seriously this paranoid and obsessed as a society that we are now using tape on doors to check if people are breaking curfews? What happened to teaching your children what's right and wrong and then letting your children make their own mistakes. Stuff like this is going to create a sheltered generation and a massive amount of cultural backlash that no one needs.

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  3. We did that with masking tape on band trips. Rooms that broke the tape ended up spending the rest of the trip with the chaperons. Nothing like having to listen to middle aged people talk, or just the threat of it, to keep teens in line. As for that mom, she's a nutjob and her son is probably one of those that should have been BOLTED in his room.

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  4. Ronnie, have you taught teenagers? Seriously, even the best of them have their lapses. And at least that way the chaperons didn't have to patrol the hallways a la Hogan's Heroes.

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  5. Here's the worst field trip story ever. A friend of mine took ten art students to Spain. One of the girl's slipped away during the night to hang out with a newly acquired friend. Several months later, it was apparent that the girl had also acquired a nasty STD. My friend is quitting teaching after this year-she has had it with kids who simply do not have any boundaries.

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  6. Is someone blaming her for the student's misbehavior?

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