A lot of events have happened since Matt and I last wrote, and we'll do our best to update the blog accordingly; but we thought we should start with the most recent and probably the most memorable: Week Without Walls, an experiential learning trip with 63 9th and 10th graders.
The trip was hilarious, exhausting, and overall a fantastic experience. We got to know a lot of new students and see new sides of kids we already had relationships with. The kids had fun too, which is saying a lot considering how utterly chaotic the week was.
Our trip started at the airport with a yelling match between one of our teachers and a Chinese tour group that kept cutting in the check-in line, followed by a delayed flight that had us arriving at our hotel around 11:30 p.m (We met at the airport a 4:30). By the time dinner wrapped up (half of our kids ordered steak!), our kids had a healthy 3 hours of sleep before our 5:30 wake up call, ensuring everyone was awake and enthusiastic for the packed day ahead.
Our first day we visited Angkor Wat and a few other temples. Lacking both a guide and energy, the kids were unimpressed by the ruins, and most hung out by the food vendors buying smoothies (both the lack of information and our students' constant quest for food were real themes thoughout the trip).
In the afternoon the students went zip-lining, which sounded awesome. Sadly, there were not enough spaces for the chaperones to go on the zip line, so we all grabbed a few beers and went wandering around some nearby temples. This was fantastic.
The next day things really started to fall apart. The whole point of experiential learning is to get students outside their comfort zone and exposed to people, places and ideas that they normally wouldn't interact with. The organizers had planned (though using the word planning really implies there was forethought) on providing this exposure through one morning of teaching at a local elementary school. Not as much service learning as I would have liked, but at least they would be in a challenging situation.
Two things interfered with this plan. One, the week we were in Siem Reap was a national holiday, which had all of the schools closing early. It's really too bad they don't mark these things on calendars.
The second interfering factor takes a bit more to explain. To make sure our kids were able to teach, we scheduled another obscenely early wake up call for 5:30 and had our young educators ready to go by 6:30, a feat we were particularly proud of. But then...the buses didn't show up. For over two hours! By the time we arrived at the school, the photographer had just enough time to snap a picture of everyone...before we were hustled back onto the bus for ATV rides!
That afternoon was filled with a cooking class that 1.) the hosting venue was entirely unequipped for and 2.) had our students cooking essentially Vietnamese food. The true highlight for our kids was the convenience store next door. From the moment we arrived we had students defecting to the air conditioned haven to buy cup noodles and cans of axe body spray. Another popular and inexplicable item for purchase was cans of milk.
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| The only sensible reaction to the heat |
Our third day was even less coherent than the day before. We spent the morning at a "sports complex" where students played in the debilitating heat of Siem Reap (which truly is the hottest place in the world) before gathering around for a first aid demonstration.
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| Look at that stellar engagment |
The barbecue lunch, which consisted of a single hamburger per person, was served at 10:30 and cooked by a bald Eastern European man with a cigarette constantly hanging out of this mouth and eyes obscured by sunglasses. It was at this venue that our principal finally broke down and screamed.
From our fun sports party (which our itinerary called "campsite time") we squeezed onto a very poorly airconditioned bus. A mere hour and a half and one flat tire later, we arrived at a fishing community. There we were ushered onto boats without any sort of explanation, and then boated through a floating village. Understandably, our heatstroked students used this as nap time.
We later learned that this floating community had a sizeable Vietnamese population, and that our school had actually donated money and supplies to the only school in the floating village. This would have been a perfect thing to discuss with students had, again, there been any forethought put into this trip.
Nonetheless, we got some good pictures out of it, which I'm pretty sure was the whole point.
That night, after returning to Siem Reap, we saw a circus performance that was really wonderful. It involved, as many of our students repeatedly pointed out, hot guys. Like, really hot guys. After the circus we took our kids to the night market for a bit of shopping. The plan had been to walk back from the night market, and it was only as we started walking back that we realized not a single chaperone knew the directions home. Here's us blocking traffic as our group of 70 tried to figure out a plan.
The last day was probably one of our favorites. It was completely unstructured so obviously it turned into a pool party where almost everyone on the trip was thrown into the water with their clothes on. It was around this time that we gave up.
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| Check out those mad teaching skills |
We made it back to Vietnam Friday night without losing a single kid! So
we're calling the trip a success and, actually, are looking forward to
another trip next year, if for no other reason than I can dress like this and no one bats an eye.
To end our post, here's a few photos of our kids doing what they did best:
We have like fifty more of these. The entire school has narcolepsy.
