Field Trip Fanatics

Remember being a kid and piling into the big yellow school bus to go to a museum with friends for a field trip? Well, those fun filled days are slowly disappearing. Across America, and in the Park City School District, there’s been a severe drop in the number of field trips. Field trips are an important part of a child’s learning and help kids to get excited about going to school and the things they get to do. All throughout America, schools are cutting these important, educational, enriching days due to budget cuts, school requirements, and scheduling issues.

Learning about something in real life is far more educational than sitting in a classroom and listening to a teacher lecture. Even if videos are shown, it’s not the same - students don’t learn as much as actually being there. Schools are trying to be more focused on how things relate to the “real world,” like showing how math problems can help you in a future job, so why are they cutting a real world experience like field trips? Studies show that students remember things better when they actually go and and have a real life experience.

In one interview, Mrs. Julie Hooker, a teacher at Treasure Mountain Junior High, said, “Students remember how they feel long after they remember what they learned." Students who were surveyed three weeks after a trip to a museum were able to remember more about what they learned than students who read about the same material in a book or watched videos.

In the words of Mrs. Duis, “We have too many students per grade level nowadays to take an entire grade on a field trip during the regular school day. It is too expensive and disruptive to the rest of the student's schedule for the day. Field trips only work well in small groups. In our core classes, that is not possible anymore.” The fact that schools don’t have the funding is a big problem, but so are the problems of large class sizes and low numbers of buses. Teachers should be encouraged to help students learn in a fun and interesting way.

The solution: provide more money for field trips! Allow students to miss classes to go on trips without having boatloads of work to make up. Stop making field trips such a hassle. It's so important to look at future careers and increase a kid’s knowledge about a topic. Students can also bring in a portion of money to help for the buses if it comes to that, so please, bring back field trips.

For the students! For the learning!

Article by Hali and Cami Burke