Field Trip!

At the beginning of December, I was asked to accompany a group of first year patisserie and bakery students on their annual class hike. A bus was scheduled to take me, three other teachers, and the group of 25 students to a trail head in the mountains above school. Thinking back on my own high school days, our field trips were to museums, historically reenacted villages, and theater performances. We were always restless, rarely attentive. I was eager to be an accomplice to a trip where students would be encouraged to run through the woods rather than tiptoe through austere galleries. Up until this time I had fancied myself a competent hiker. Hanging out with kids who had been trekking these hills for their entire lives, I learned a lesson or two. The biggest victory of the day is that I didn't bite the dust in front of everyone. There had been some rain the night before and the trails were extremely slippery. As I was making the ginger steps of someone with wooden legs, the youth of Reunion Island were racing each other down the steepest, muddiest inclines you've ever seen. I was impressed. "Madame, just do this!" They would yell to me, as one kid did a back flip off a rock and the other a cartwheel down a cliff. Clearly they had a better idea of what they were doing than I did, so I stopped monitoring acrobatic behavior.

We arrived at our beautiful summit destination in the late morning, just in time to see an astounding view of Mafate and the Riviere de Galets before the clouds started rolling in. Museums, theater, arts, and culture are so important, but after this field trip I have come to feel that the simplicity and beauty of a day in the woods needs a place at school as well.