School Trips

Around about 5am, you’ll meet up with the students outside school, where some balding 1970’s throwback in a tight-fitting polo shirt will introduce himself as Reg the coach driver. As he hurls suitcases into the hull of his vehicle, the students mutter derogatory whispers to each other about your choice of “own clothes.” Jeans. You dress like their mums and dads. The only students who are also wearing jeans are the four Emo’s who vampirically shield their faces from the sunrise. And by jeans, I mean spray on black denim, stretching from ankle to halfway up their arse, the rest covered with some degree of modesty by 30 cm of grey flannel pants. All the other students, eager to cast away the identify-stifling monotony of school uniform, express their individuality by wearing their own clothes, which in every case consists of the same grey tracksuit bottoms and pastel t-shirt. But they still laugh at your middle-aged choice of blue jeans. Groovy.

The coach pulls away, seatbelts lazily slung over one arm, and the students tuck into their breakfasts of cans of coke, chocolate bars and packets of Haribo. You feel like you’ll be the first to get sick. But as it turns out, this honour goes to a Year 9 girl who sat on the back seat and only got halfway through her bucket of pick n’ mix before requiring a second bucket at the front of the coach.

So, did you decide on an overseas trip, in which case the airport now beckons, or have you made a coach your home for the week? Did this all spring from a staffroom conversation about countries in the world you’d love to visit, but couldn’t afford to? China? Russia? Singapore? By taking a party of school children there, you only pay in terms of effort. And sure, it’ll be a big effort. It’s no holiday. But it’s an experience. Potentially, in our job, we could “experience” any country in the world at no financial cost, as long as we can persuade parents to stump up the fare for their child and as long as there isn’t currently an earthquake, political revolution or Civil War occurring at that time. Given that you have to book these things 18 months in advance, you never quite know. (Not that many of us were burnt over Libya recently.)

One child will have the audacity to ask you if teachers have to pay. When you explain that you don’t, because you’re working, in fact working overtime because you’re on duty 24 hours a day for 7 days, the student just asks again, “But you don’t have to pay, right? We’re paying your fare?” Yes, and your parents’ taxes pay our wages and we still get longer holidays then them, so fuck off now please.

Continental trips don’t always require travel by air. To keep the costs down, you may have opted for coach all the way. A fine idea until the 18th hour of travelling through France, through the night, four hours since the last piss-stop, the coach bog closed because the tank is now full of all the consequences of that Haribo and coke, plus you can’t sleep due to the crick in your neck and the faint odour of vomit and fart.

However, on the way there the channel tunnel is fun. Student gullibility proves as entertaining as ever as they stare out of the windows trying to spot fish. You halt temporarily at customs while French immigration cause you anxiety by taking a dislike to the one non-European passport in your pile. As the Nigerian Year 10 boy is led away you joke to the rest that he’s being strip searched, but you play down talk of this when he arrives back 30 minutes later looking like he’d just spent the night at Michael Jackson’s house.

Hotels have little to recommend them beyond having a roof, a toilet and somewhere to lie down to sleep. In this respect, they marginally edge out a coach for comfort. On the continent, they tend to have considered escape from fire only insofar as to ensure that windows open wide and should you have the same powers as Spiderman then you won’t be at risk of burning or falling to your death. Assume that the staircase will not permit escape, having been added as an afterthought for persons with 20-inch waists and 50-inch inside leg measurements. Those taking students on mountaineering trips should however find staircases and fire escapes manageable and just as challenging and fun as the mountains.

The hotel experience allows students to practice their studied languages too, because they will come into contact with members of the public, usually as they walk through the bar area. Although this section of the public isn’t anymore diverse than middle-aged men with moustaches and an unhealthy interest in your older female students, it still presents an opportunity for conversation. Like, “What the fuck are you looking at, you dirty old perv?”

Another horizon-widening opportunity comes courtesy of another school sharing your hotel. Teenagers tend to stare at each other un-self-consciously and then moan to teachers that the other kids keep looking at them. At some point, conflict will arise and so the resulting social contact with the teachers of the other school can be exploited to help your own professional development. You learn something. You learn that your rules for your students and your level of care and your resistance to the chance of getting pissed on duty makes you a far more responsible teacher than they are. Beware the phrase, “They’re only kids.”

Whoever the kids are, they won’t want to go to sleep. Ever. At least not until about an hour before you try to wake them up in the morning. As you force your way into their rooms at 6.00am and encourage them out of bed, you realise how unsavoury and unhygienic it is allowing more than two teenagers to share a room. The one with six in smells like an abattoir and looks like East London on a morning in 1941.

Finally, you will find that the old myth of students wanting to get drunk and have sex on school trips is dispelled, because your lot are so crap and needy they wouldn’t have the guts. They will want to know at regular intervals of about five minutes where we’re going next, what’s it got there, how much longer is it, is there a shop and when do we get back to the hotel. You could be staring across at the Matterhorn, halfway up Machu Pichu, strolling along the Great Wall of China, sailing down the Rhine or standing by the Grand Canyon, it doesn’t matter, because they will still want to buy some fucking Haribo, have a fart contest in their hotel room and watch a very sweary American comedy film on the coach DVD player.