By: Myles Chu, Staff Writer
I can’t remember the last time I heard a student say they enjoyed being in school. The boredom we have to endure in class each day is what gives many students absolutely no motivation to be in school. And to me, the reason is because of the fact that we are stuck learning in an indoor environment every single day. Like, when has sitting in a classroom all day long ever been enjoyable? When was the last time you felt thrilled doing something in class?
There was this one time in my sophomore English class my teacher did an hour-long presentation. The presentation, along which included endless speaking and my teacher’s monotonous voice, made me exhausted since it was hard to keep my eyes glued to the screen the whole time. I took quick glances at my watch, hoping that time would pass by quickly. In reality, time took forever. I began to question reality and ask myself, “Why did I sign up for this torture?”
Something that needs to be done is for teachers to develop more interesting ways to teach their students, and what better way to do that than taking them on field trips. In addition to more field trips, there also needs to be a bigger variety of them. Most high school students haven’t had the experience of exploring the outside world with our classes since early middle school. For some older students, that’s around 5 years ago. 5 years of learning stuff in which we can never fully understand without exploring the outside world, where most of what we actually learn is based.
Even back in middle school, a majority of our field trips were just visiting museums such as the Academy of Science and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I remember when my classmates would just whine about being at the Academy of Science consecutively with their class, saying “Oh, how come we never do anything fun for field trips. All we do is come to this same place every single year.”
I know there are some unique classes that have field trips frequently, including AP Environmental Science, where they explore national parks like Muir Woods and Yosemite to learn about the different wildlife inhabiting those areas. But, the thing is, not everyone has a special class in which they dedicate their learning to field trips. Not everyone is willing to enroll in a class just for field trips, so why can’t there be more field trips incorporated into the classes that everyone has, such as History and Math.
For instance, there could be more field trips exploring the different murals all across San Francisco, which is great for history classes since a lot of murals focus on different cultural traditions from the past. In addition, there could be more field trips for math class, such as visiting skyscrapers. Students could apply their math skills to real-life by calculating the height of these skyscrapers. At times, it’s better for students to interact with what they learn in person so that they develop a much deeper connection and understanding. The joy of being in the outside world would not only lighten up the mood, but it would demonstrate the fun in learning.
