Today we loaded up onto charter buses and went up into the mountains to play in the snow. Luckily, we had a ton of parent chaperones and the kids were divvied up according to personality and likeability–parent traits included. Initially we had put The Screamer in our group (the Lead Teacher and I), but she protested: “I’m ALWAYS with the teachers! I HATE being with the teachers.” We kicked her out in three seconds flat. There was no way we wanted to put up with that voice all afternoon.
You have to imagine a hundred kids stuffed into snowsuits and snow boots and yes, it really was that cute. The two girls in my group are the tiniest in our class, four-years-old, weighing in at forty pounds a piece, and extremely spirited. When we arrived we set them loose in the snow park armed with mittens, hats, and gloves–which they promptly lost. Someone had the vague idea that I should host a round of Freeze Dance in the snow with a boom box and children’s song cd. It lasted five minutes…there would be no dancing in this type of snow. The park was covered with a dense, hard, crusty ice pack of snow that had been well traipsed about prior to our visit. My foot sunk in up to my knee the second I stepped out into the snow. My snazzy, Vans snow boots I used to wear in the parking lot at so many ski resorts in Colorado were useless. Sometimes my footing was stable and I could walk a few steps with ease, but most of the time my feet sunk into the snow and I had to tug myself out of various drifts and dunes of hard packed snow. Now imagine that you’re three feet tall…these kids were crawling on all fours trying to get around. One kid sunk so far into the snow she got stuck and ended up thrashing around.
Because we prepared for the inevitable, someone brought syrup for snow cones, the snow being removed from a fresh patch near the trail. We scooped up snow and loaded it up with cherry syrup and the kids would promptly drop the whole thing and eat it off the ground. I watched the Screamer bend down on all fours, fanny in the air, lapping up the remains of a cherry snow cone mixed with dirt and twigs on the ground. She didn’t understand when her chaperone told her she might just want to leave it…
My little itty bitty students didn’t last long…their feet got wet, their gloves were caked with ice, they had super runny noses from the cold–the snot mixing in with their snow cones. I ended up taking the two of them back into the bus to change socks and warm up. I learned that the sledding hill was nothing but a sheet of ice with several large mud puddles at the bottom. My own feet got wet, somehow, and I was pretty content with sitting in the bus with my kids. All the kids passed out on the ride home–some adults included. The kids were ornery and grouchy when we returned. I was glad to hand them over to their parents.
One of my students–the one with the beautiful afro of hair–got one of her braids stuck on the coat hook in her cubby. She was thrashing and screaming: “My hair! My hair!” I unhooked her with much difficulty and she sobbed into my thermal top until she soaked all the way through my shoulder. “That was so scary,” I acknowledged; I rocked her back and forth, “Wow, I know you thought you were stuck, but I would never let anything happen to you.” My heart broke a little bit, I hate seeing kids super upset. And it’s really true, you take these kids on a field trip and you know that you can’t let anything happen to them…One of our high profile kids, the one who has a security team come along on trips and I have to carry a panic button with me, crashed on the sledding hill and there was not much that could be done. We do the best we can, right? To keep these kids safe and protected, but all the security in the world can’t necessarily stop an accident from happening or the unexpected from occurring. Parents just get so good at protecting their kids, and I’m inexperienced but learning.