Counting Heads

I just went on my last official school field trip. In my 35+ career in education and half of that as an actual teacher labouring in the Canadian as well as international school trenches, I have been on many off-school site trips, residential sleepovers, outdoor camps, and days out. I know children love these breaks from classroom routine and I know they can make the learning 'come alive'. I also know they can help to support and consolidate concepts learned in the classroom. Plus they are memorable experiences. Right? Yes. I know all of this, and I will continue to be a strong advocate of well planned, educationally sound field excursions within the curriculum framework. However, having said that, I also have to admit that on my list of ‘things I do not want to do (anymore) at this time in my life', I would rank the idea of going out on a field trip with kids right up there on my list, somewhere between getting a root canal done sans anesthesia and drinking a cup of Indonesian kopi luwak java (some kind of coffee that is made of beans that have passed through the digestive system of the Asian palm civet and then been collected by rummaging around in its feces…nasty!)    

My current distaste for field trips isn’t really because of a particular incident over the years of my illustrious and sometimes not so illustrious career tending to the development of young minds. My patience is just running a bit thin at this stage of my 'working' life, and even the slightest and usual trial and tribulation that go into the modus operandi construct of a school field trip (kids vomiting on the bus, parent-volunteers going rogue, kids petting some rabid 'but it looked nice' dog, etc.) would quickly wear down the treads of this already balding imperturbability tire of mine. Mind you, in retrospect, there are a few incidents that do come to mind that even today make me shutter at the thought of how things that had gone wrong could have gone terribly and horribly wrong. Take that 10 day outdoor school I had organized on one of the Gulf Islands where I had to intervene with one of the camp maintenance workers…"no, you will not go into the boys' hut after lights out to give them back rubs...! and no, the boys are perfectly capable of turning that tap on in the showers without your assistance...!!!”. Needless to say, this fellow’s stint at this camp came to an abrupt end after one phone call to the camp management to share with them these major red flags. 

And then there was Sean. Ah Sean, I will never forget Sean. Sean was a 13 year old kid in my Grade 7 class when I was teaching in Germany at the Canadian section of a NATO school. Sean was a good kid, kind of geeky, and had quite an appetite and the corpulence that matched his love for food. We set out one day on a field trip to visit a museum in Strasbourg, all 20 of us, myself, an assistant teacher, 17 thirteen year olds, and Sean. A cakewalk of a trip...30 minute train ride, short walk to the Musee Alsacien of Strasbourg, bagged lunch in the museum cafeteria, short walk back to the train station, and a quick 30 minute trip back to school in Lahr. A simple, straight forward, uncomplicated field trip, right? Wrong.

Actually things were going very well until we got back to the train station on the return leg of our journey. The customary head count (probably the 12th by that time of day) followed by the boarding of the train, after which there would be another head count - ah yes, the heart-pounding headcount, the time it takes to count a bunch of wiggly moving heads before you get to your total, is about the most nerve-wracking experience for a teacher on a field trip. The possibility that there might be one missing drives teachers to double and triple check again and again, which only serves to heighten the tension. Anyways, here we were standing on a platform of the Strasbourg Train Station, both my assistant and I counting heads…14, 15, 16, 17... we both came up one short. Count again, still one short. Our train is about to leave…who’s missing, it’s 5pm…rush hour, people all over the place, we’re one kid short, the train is about to leave…who’s missing? One kid yells out, "it’s Sean, he’s missing!" 
No one had noticed Sean vanishing from the group, and yet he had been the first one in line when we had singled filed through Strasbourg's rue pietonne to get from the museum to the train station. I was the lead and my assistant had been charged with bringing up the rear. Sean had gone AWOL during that short walk. Not cool, not calm, and totally uncollected, I instructed my assistant to get on the train with the remaining 17 kids and get them back to school. I would stay behind in an attempt to find a 13 year old chubby, dorky looking Canadian kid wondering among the mass of rush hour crowds of 300,000 end-of-the-work-day-tired Strasbourgeois that congested the streets and sidewalks of central Strasbourg. I had just lost a kid in the middle of Europe!!! Does it get any worse than that? 

I started walking the streets of Strasbourg, first backtracking to the museum, then back again to the train station, waited at the train station, backtracked again, then back to the station, checked with the info centre at the station, and just waited, and waited, hoping that somehow a miracle would happen and Sean would appear in front of me. Disheartened, I finally phoned Madeleine from a pay phone (they existed then). Madeleine answered...and this is when the miracle happened. The first question from her was “Where are you? Sean's father phoned your principal and told him he was heading out to pick up his son at the Kehl train station on the France/Germany border, and then on to pick you up at the Strasbourg train station. What's going on?” What? How can this be? Madeleine reassured me that Sean and his dad would explain everything once they met up with me. I waited around for a good hour…the longest and most anxious and strung out hour of my life. Finally Sean’s Dad drove up. I saw Sean sitting in the back seat looking sheepish, big times! 

I got in the car, and Sean’s dad immediately apologized for what had just happened, and then turned around to his sheepish son and asked/told/ordered him ‘Sean, you have something to say to Mr. Lemoine?” 
“I’m sorry Mr. Lemoine”. 

My inner voice said..."WTF just happened you little shit?! You’re damn lucky you’re not somewhere in Morocco right now on the back of some ugly camel being transported to some child prostitution market!!!” My outer voice morphed that into: “Sean, can you explain what just happened…where did you disappear to?” Sean proceeded to explain that on the way back from the museum, we had passed a McDonalds, (which, being the fine-gueule that he was, he had noticed on the way to the museum), and he, being at the front of the line, figured he would have enough time to go in, order and get a Big Mac, come out and join in at the end of the line. A note here, McDonald’s back then was known for its fast, friendly service, at least in Canada, but this was not the case in France, the service may have been friendly, but surely not fast. Anyways, Dad got his son back, I eventually recovered from my nervous breakdown, and Sean got to eat a Big Mac in Strasbourg. All's well that ends well, I suppose.

Now, back to my official ‘last field trip’…