Why aren’t adult field trips a thing?
They are. You just have to sign up for them. Nobody’s gonna come drag you out of your comfy chair to do it like they do when you’re a kid.
There are probably twenty places in your city where you can show up and pay $20 for a tour.
If you’re in Denver, for example, you can go to the Coors brewery, or the Art Museum, or the Botanic Gardens, or Buffalo Bill’s grave, or Meow Wolf.
If you want someone to call you at 6 am and order you to call in sick to work because you’re going on a field trip, please let me know and I’ll make a business out of it.
Along similar lines, there are chartered bus tours that you can sign up for to go to multiple destinations in a city farther afield.
The local bus company does a “mystery bus trip” every couple of months or so where you pay a flat fee, hop on the bus and go do something. They give you just enough info to know if you might want to do it or not and how to dress and the rest is just up to whatever happens
“Bring a shovel, painters overalls, and a bag of lime”
Stranahan’s is a fun tour too!
There might be something to that… Is it illegal to forge a doctor’s note? If so, you’ll just need to keep a doctor on retainer.
Only if your employer requires a doctor’s note for sick days. Honestly if I ever have another job that does require a doctor’s note I might just make a habit of forging those because fuck that noise
Unfortunately it’s perjury. All places of employment are considered to be courtroom proceedings per the Honesty Expansion Act of 2021
lol wut
safety first
Capitalism.
Costs need to be cut for the sake of commercial school budgets. Because somewhere the budgeting became a school’s job and not a regional government thing.
They exist, just search for “old watermill tour” and I’m sure you’ll find something close to you.
On an unrelated note, the word “adult” is cursed.
“Adult field trip” has a much different connotation than simply a field trip that adults go on…
To a small degree they exist. At least for the parents of said children. My kids’ school frequently asks for parent volunteers to go on field trip to help watch the kids.
Do I have to bring my own cattle prod or do they provide those?
I believe the school system provides those for free.
Until the DoE is disbanded
Then they’ll be issued guns
Yeah ours used to do that, and now they require a full background check before you can volunteer. So no field trips.
require a full background check before you can volunteer
The local animal shelter is begging for dog walkers. But they send your info to a totally shady international background check place that shouldn’t know very much and also violates data sovereignty.
So no dog walkers.
A background check for working with kids makes sense. For walking dogs though? What do they think is gonna happen?
Nah, I’ll pass on that one.
The background check is pretty easy. Costs less than $20 iirc.
Perhaps they’ve done something totally awesome that means they can’t pass one?
Schedule a tour of your local water plant! Even small cities have interesting setups, and its in their best interests to give tours and build community trust.
Great idea!
I’ve been sent to plenty of conferences that were pretty fun
Assuming you mean work-sponsored, they exist. My job usually does one (optional and workload permitting) like every six months. Outside of work…well if you’re an adult nothing is stopping you from going to a museum or an old mill yourself.
Every month or so we have corporate, engineers, sales, customers, whoever come through the plant for a tour. Makes me feel like an oompa loompa.
If only the higher-ups got into dangerous mishaps, followed by you and your coworkers singing a song about what they did wrong.
Oompa-loompa dinkety dorklift…
We have those! They’re called: “conferences” and “trade shows”. Some business sectors hold them in places like Las Vegas.
I went to one in Orlando one time.
I don’t remember what the conference was even for, but I sure as shit remember scuba diving in the Aquarium at Epcot.
I go on field trips all the time! Take a day of PTO and straight-up go the science museum or the zoo or the Japanese garden alone, but with a packed lunch so it really feels like a field trip.
When you’re an adult, you can do whatever you want*.
* terms and conditions apply. Travelling, accommodations, tickets, food and planning not included and must be paid separately. Field trips can only been done on non-work days or after applying for PTO. Plans may be cancelled by your SO, kids or employer at will and without prior notice.
It does fall a little flat when I do have to buy my own tickets, but on the other hand, I can just be all “yoop,” and suddenly be in an art museum with no planning or prior expectations of ever planning it out.
The best trips are the ones that just abruptly happen.
My employer is sponsor of a (huge) museum and other cultural institutions. They have several family passes that can be borrowed by us to visit those alone or with our families for free.
I have used that several times now - go to work on the morning, eat lunch with your colleagues and then take some time off in the afternoon and visit that museum or another place.
And yet when I try to hold hands with a 12-year old at the museum, so we don’t get separated, I get ‘a conversation’ with the cops. So unfair. Just trying to fit in.
And this is why I loved being a community education teacher.
I get to decide where we’re going for an excursion/field trip. I choose which activities we do. I not only get to participate but I’m expected to actively get involved to encourage my students. I get paid to do it.
I’m literally living the dream.
I had a student ask “what’s the big red building on [Street]” and enough students were curious that we spent 20 minutes talking about the building. It’s the pipeworks and gas mains museum and I’ve wanted to visit for years but never had time or justification for the adult entry fee …so you bet we took a field trip the following week!
(another upside to community ed, we can plan and initiate a field trip on 20 minutes notice. Last week the toilets in the classroom started spilling over and we couldn’t physically be in the building, but class had just started, so we grabbed our bags, I grabbed the field trip kit, and we walked to the train and went to the beach. “Change of plans, maths class is cancelled, we’re doing environmental science today, who’s ready to learn about coastal ecosystems”)
A few staff members and I have joked that we’d save so much money just ditching our school building entirely and literally every class is a field trip. Field trips are some of the most fun, most engaging, and honestly sometimes the most effective ways to learn something. Place based learning and hands on learning utilises a different part of our developmental skills compared to classroom based learning, as well as community engagement and life skills developed from getting out into the community and learning how the world works.
But the way America does excursions and field trips is odd to me, because they’re often expensive and you get a chartered bus and it’s a curated experience. Vs Australian community ed where a field trip is often “walking to the local train station to talk to the station staff and learn about the ticketing system” it’s free and is like 40 minutes out of our class then we walk back to school and you do several things like that a week.
walking
That’s the problem. This really only works for urban spaces in the US. So much of this place is sprawled out, you often need to arrange for private transportation.
Unless you’re arranging transportation for something that’s within walking distance. That would be kind of nuts.
Yes, kids tend to learn better when they’re not chained to their desks in a Taylorist torture chamber. Thanks for being a great teacher.
My dude, my elementary school principal was afraid of busses. Every time a teacher would take their class on a field trip (about once every other year) they’d get fired for some bullshit reason. No, we got to sit quietly in assemblies. Far more educational that way, right?
That’s why I chaperon every trip as recently as today.
Do you have to use PTO, or do they just let you have the day? Do they pay you for the day without having to use PTO? That sounds awesome. I would be signing up even though I don’t have kids.
Not OP, but they almost certainly have to use PTO at least in US.
Many places you didn’t even get off for Jury Duty
I find the inclusion of the word “ass” here extraneous.
Extraneous ass word.
My first day at my new job a month ago, we all loaded onto a bus and took a guided tour of campus. Had lunch at the cafeteria, stopped for ice cream. It really felt like a field trip.
I had a similar experience a long time ago when I worked for a telco. We got on a bus and they took us to visit a tower, their NOC, and other sites. It was pretty interesting. That’s also where I learned they literally have a dedicated dashboard just to monitor the CEO’s mobile signal and data speeds, to make sure it never falters. So from his perspective, the service is great! For everyone else, not so much.
Pretty soon they might need dedicated dashboards to monitor their body armor.
Congrats on the new job. What are you doing?
Thanks! I got hired at a pretty big university (better than the one I attended for sure) to do documentation (and hopefully, increasingly data) work in their advancement department. Kind of random and the pay could definitely be better, but I’m generally pretty happy with the environment. Nice to not be supporting abject evil. First actual work-from-home job without feeling a suspicious eye on me at all times. Trying to make use of the free certification courses they offer and am halfway through CompTIA Data+. Nice break from the Uber/Lyft grind for awhile, anyway.
My employer has their own power plant and gardens and I got to go on a “field trip” to both of those places and yeah, it was pretty dope. They sent out an invite asking the department if we wanted to go check out these places, so I signed up figuring it would be a good networking opportunity. It was, I connected with a bunch of people. Plus i got to see the inside of a power plant, how cool is that? More employers should do this.
School in general is wasted on kids. No kid cares about history or god forbid chemistry. You know who does? The person who just became an adult and is about to FUCKING GRADUATE! I only remember the last year and a half of school, because I was actually old enough to care and process that shit. Everything prior was just needless torture.
One great thing about working at a big tech company is that they would give us field trips. Like, legit, we’re all gonna go play at the Imaginarium kind of field trips.
Hey when I was a kid I loved any chance to escape kid jail.
Well, we have an adult version for you to try escaping.
I told my mom this story the other day, she didn’t know about it. It involves the shitty private elementary school I went to: We had a field trip to the Lincoln Boyhood Home in southern Indiana, about a two-hour drive. It looks quite nice now, but in the 80s, and I will never forget this… we got there, and there were some log cabin foundations in a pit. We looked down at the pit for a few minutes, then were rounded up back into the carpool station wagons and drove back home.
I didn’t mind all that much because I got out of school and we stopped at McDonald’s on the way back, but looking back on it, what a strange day.
Aren’t Company Outing’s a thing?
We do ours once a Year, last time we went to a bird sanctuary.
Our company is across the street from a heritage railway. They operate a steam locomotive railway with a museum at the other end.
We went on a company trip this summer. Which meant we took the railway to the other end. This being something that I was looking forward to doing myself.
But instead of actually, you know, seeing the museum, we went to a terrible restaurant. Where my boss proceeded to drink nine glasses of wine at 2 in the afternoon. While we collectively ate one of the worst meals I’ve had.
Afterwards, he felt so bad about the trip that he offered me another ticket so I could actually visit the museum on my own time :D
Now I want to go that Museum too, it sounds awsome :D Have Fun :D
It is; they’ve got an awesome collection of steam locomotives and matching rolling stock. They also do a lot of restoration work.
Here’s actually a shot from the railroad crossing at the end of our street. And yes, the locomotive is ‘backwards’ in this configuration, as it can equally pull in both directions. Makes it a lot easier that they don’t need to turn the locomotive itself around at either end.
Never had one in the U.S. At best, the food truck shows up or they have a “pizza party,” but actually leaving work? On company time?
Damn that sucks.
My former Boss even apologized that they couldn’t do one during COVID and made an
even bigger one to “make up for it” as the Lockdown was over.
Same for great literature.
I wonder if the fact we push these amazing stories on high school kids, before they have any capacity to resonate with them, is resulting in less appreciation for the literature than would exist if we didn’t push it at all.
Like, I read The Grapes of Wrath as a teenager and quite simply didn’t feel it. I mean I felt it a little, but not the way I would now after just grinding through poverty for decades.
It does the opposite. It makes kids resent reading if all they have to read is stuff they are not interested in. My worst experience to this day is still reading Madame Bovary.
Mine was Bartleby the scrivener… I preferred not to read for quite a long time after.
Is it also a realist work? Taking 3 pages to describe how someone walked out of the door into the garden?
No general education system is going to be able to tailor curricula to every single child based on their individual interests. Besides that, children’s interests change constantly and they need to learn things beyond just what they’re interested in at any given moment. That includes reading things that aren’t interesting to them but might be interesting to their peers (or even to them later on).
Reading boring shit you don’t like is necessary in a lot of jobs. Training yourself to get through it is also a skill set and one you should develop early. And in some cases, it reveals a new interest.
Not saying it should cater to them but I know a bunch of people who have sworn of reading because they started hating it because of school.
It is possible there was a learning need that wasn’t being met for those people who swore off reading. We’re getting better at catching those but it’s difficult. Kids are people and can hide a learning disorder to seem normal. A good teacher knows how to make the student comfortable enough so the teacher can figure that out and plan an alternative learning strategy. Not all teachers are good, but most try very hard to do well in a very demanding and low-paying job that is increasingly disrespected, including by comments like yours.
The way your comments read seem like an indictment on every teacher and I frequently encounter similar attitudes online based on anecdotal evidence of a single incident. The reality is the world is hard and people are increasingly bragging online about how little work they did in school to prepare themselves for it. This is increasingly going to translate to anti-intellectualism and lower outcomes in society. We already see it.
Going back to your case, you disliked reading Madame Bovary, which I know is just one example. And maybe you had a shit experience with teachers, which I’m sorry you had to go through. But that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t read Madame Bovary in school, it just means you didn’t like it and maybe had other shit you had to deal with as well.
You must be reading something wrong here then. I never disrespected teachers in any way. I also don’t believe the people I mentioned have any learning disabilites. They just slowly got soured on reading by being forced to read uninteresting books.
I actually love reading it’s just not fun having no choice. If the obligatory reading was a list of a couple things and you could choose what seems the most interesting I think that would work better.
My opinion on madame bovary was just to show that I can see how many people can have a dislike of several books that are on the curriculum and that can then fuel their dislike of reading. There were other books I was not the biggest fan of when I had to read them but bovary was the only one I actually found dreadful.
That’s fair, sorry for misunderstanding. There’s a tradeoff between “interesting to the student” and the teacher’s time as well. My guess is most teachers would love to cater reading more towards every student’s interest along with some required reading just because there’s a canon you need to understand, even if you don’t like it. Maybe technology will make that easier, but getting it in the classroom is an uphill battle very much outside of teacher control.
Tl;Dr.
(Sorry, I had to)
