Published: February 10, 2008 09:50 pm            

The Off Season: A lesson well learned — in a restaurant

TERRE HAUTE — Unless you’re reading The Off Season for the first time today, you probably already know that writing isn’t how I make the house payment; my day job is teaching school.

On most days, I love it, and one of the reasons is because I learn something every day right alongside my students.

A few weeks ago I took my honors Humanities class — 16 pretty sharp seniors — to the Swope Art Museum and the Indiana State Art Gallery on what traditionally has been called a “field trip.”

No fields were involved in this one, but it certainly was a trip.

As tradition has it, we always stop in at a local fast-food restaurant for a quick cup of coffee or breakfast sandwich before we pull our brains out of our backpacks and go to work.

On that particular morning, we had spent about 20 minutes tackling our food and juice when I headed to the service counter for a refill on my coffee, and a gentleman carrying his takeout to the door took the opportunity to approach me to ask a question.

Turning around, I expected the usual, “What school are you from?” or, at worst, “Your kids are a little loud this morning.”

But he asked me with a rather grim face (I’m paraphrasing here), “I’m a retired teacher, and I’d like to know how having your students in this restaurant can be justified to taxpayers? When I taught, our kids always ate breakfast before they went to school.”

You know, I tend to think that most people are pretty friendly — for instance, see my column on waving to folks in passing cars — so, naturally, I thought this guy was just pulling my leg a little, perhaps happy that as a retiree he was pleased his days of watching classes were over. I replied: “We’re just trying to get a little juice in us before the art museum opens in a few minutes.”

But he wasn’t kidding, and a few of my students picked up on it before I did, since I have a chronic inability to read faces.

One particularly quick-witted student in my group came up with a line that I wished I had though of: “We’re just part of President Bush’s economic stimulus package,” he told the man with a grin.

I imagine my laughing at his comment didn’t make matters any better, and as I offered my cup to the girl behind the counter, our critic headed for the door, but not before he muttered, “Education is going to s---.”

Apparently, he taught agribusiness.

Within minutes we had boarded our bus and headed to the Swope, which my new-found friend would be happy to know has free admission. After a good while there enjoying the work of such great painters as Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, we trekked by foot a few blocks over to the Clabber Girl museum and restaurant for lunch and some snooping at the gem of a collection there.

I want to assure everyone, my kids paid for their own meals. Schools aren’t the most conducive places to develop the best eating habits.

By the time my kids usually get through the serving line and sit down to their food, their lunchtime is more of a communal feed than it is a meal.

So, we spent a good 45 minutes just eating and gabbing and digesting at the restaurant; it was all very civilized.

After our repast, we hoofed it again — I’m sure we met Indiana State academic standards for physical education that day — this time, four blocks or so north and west over to the Indiana State University campus and our second art gallery of the day. A collection there called “Photographs of Place” fit nicely into the group’s study of the subject we had a semester ago, and we spent most of an hour there looking at and discussing the work. By 1:30, we were on our way back to school on the bus, the driver of which, I might add, was paid out of my kids’ pockets, not those of the taxpayers.

As a part of their day freeloading on the state’s dime, my students had to write a paper about a half-dozen of the works they encountered that cold January day.

One of them wrote in her conclusion, “I think that you can teach art, but you can never get the same understanding as when you experience it for yourself.

I also believe that sometimes you can learn more outside of the classroom. This was a trip that helped us better understand the elements of art.”

Perhaps I should have had her talk to our caustic friend that morning, but I could have easily turned loose just about anyone else in the class for that matter.

Nearly every one of my kids included a little journal entry about the cloudy start to our day.

I teach in a corporation that has a board of education and a superintendent and a principal who understand that if I’m going to teach a class like mine, they can expect me to take it on the road every once in a while.

As a matter of fact, my gang is next headed to the symphony this month and to a play next month.

Thankfully, the people who guide our students’ educations know that learning sometimes comes best outside the box we call a classroom.

In a recent Newsweek magazine article, a Los Angeles elementary school principal named Claudia Ross said that her school can only take half the field trips it did before No Child Left Behind, that Frankenstein’s monster of a mandate that schools have been left to deal with for the past five years.

“They [the trips] were all academically based, but they no longer fit a budget focused on test scores, not general enrichment,” Ross said.

The article went on to list NASA’s Johnson Space Center and the Chicago Children’s Museum as places fewer and fewer kids can see during a school day.

After all, who would want to waste their time in places like those when they can be in a classroom preparing for a standardized test?

It’s true, my kids missed a few classes that day to take in the art museums, and I apologize to their teachers.

But I know they learned quite a bit in the dimly lit, wonderfully quiet places we visited.

I think they even learned a little at the restaurant, too.

Mike Lunsford can be reached at hickory913@aol.com, or through regular mail c/o the Tribune-Star, PO Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808.

        

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