Short Essay On Field Trip
Olowookere Devost
America250 is a nonpartisan initiative working to engage every American in commemorating and celebrating the 250th anniversary of our country. It is spearheaded by the congressionally-appointed U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission and its nonprofit supporting organization, America250.org, Inc.
Elementary School (3rd to 5th Grade): Students are asked to submit artwork in response to the prompt or a short essay (up to 100 words). Artwork can include physical artwork like sculptures, painting, photography, etc. submitted through a high-res photo or a digital drawing.
So, every semester I teach, we go to the museum. Sometimes we go as a group (although I find this a little on the restrictive side); sometimes we go on our own, with a worksheet or other assignment as a guide; and sometimes we split the difference, meeting as a group to have a brief discussion, exploring on our own, and then reconvening to debrief. This semester, teaching in a neighboring county of NYC, I opted for a self-guided field trip to the Met that would culminate in a short 2-page paper on an object the student encountered at the museum. (NB: although this is the assignment I actually used for the assignment, I acknowledge that it would benefit from a bit of revision.) Everyone went on their own time, and in exchange for asking my students to schlep to Manhattan I cancelled one class.
Why were the museum papers so good? When I asked my students, they replied that they enjoyed the agency of choosing their own work of art to focus on, and the more leisurely span of time to write about a single object they had seen in person. Of course, the take-home essay assignment similarly allowed for choice and offered ample time to write, but also demanded that the students address the concept or issue I chose within their three works of art. The museum assignment was comparatively broad and open-ended, giving the students wide latitude to focus exclusively on their chosen work, without taking sociopolitical, historical, or cultural information into consideration. Perhaps the physical experience of a work of art spurred them to mine the object for information rather than the textbook or internet, and to focus on the more formal, immediate conditions of the work rather than textual descriptions of it in the reading we had been doing.
Here, then, lies the deepest value of a field trip: the near accidental, but always significant, encounter with someone whom the student assumes is an Other before the trip, but may discover afterward is startlingly human and known and familiar. For most of us, including our students, that requires seeing, tasting, smelling, hearing, touching. The more we are in face-to-face, real time contact with another, the more likely we are to drop the stereotypes we normally use to keep others boxed away from our familiar world.
W. Michael Ashcraft is a professor of religion at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri. He received his PhD in American religious history from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. His first book was entitled The Dawn of the New Cycle: Point Loma Theosophists and American Culture, published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2002. He has edited and contributed chapters to collections and is the book review editor for Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions. He is currently working on a book about the history of the study of new religious movements. He regularly teaches undergraduate courses on ethics, world religions, religions in America, gender and religion, method and theory in the study of religion, new religious movements, and peace studies. He is married to Carrol K. Davenport, an Episcopal priest and hospice chaplain. They have two daughters.
Header Image: Snake handling at Pentecostal Church of God, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky, September 15, 1946 (National Archives and Records Administration ARC Identifier 541335). Photo by Russell Lee. In the Public Domain.
9 year old Neha S from Chennai shares the wonderful memory of a field trip from school, to a farm and her experience there. Dont miss this lovely walk through the farms. Neha is a student of N.S.N. Matriculation, Chennai
The aunty and uncle who were working in the field, took us all around the field and gave us an experience of what all farmers do in their day to day life. That was the day we were let to walk in the sludge with the supervision of adults. I understood what all a farmer does to yield our everyday food.
In 2015, I had the best trip of my life. It was a trip, I can never forget. It was in the summer. This trip made me so happy because I went to states I have not been in before. In the trip, I met new people and went to new places and saw new things. I never expected the trip to be so nice, but it ended up being my best trip ever in my life so far. Why was the trip one I can never forget?Firstly, the trip, I have being talking about was a trip to America with my family. I went with my parents and my siblings. One reason why I loved this trip so much is that, in this trip before I arrived in America, my family and I stopped by at France. It was my first time going to France, and I was in Paris. So, I found that really interesting. The main reason my family and I stopped at France was that we used the airline Air France, which was also a first for me, and we had to go to France. I was really fun experience, but I like to say, I hated the airplane food. Save your time!
We can take care of your essay
- Proper editing and formatting
- Free revision, title page, and bibliography
- Flexible prices and money-back guarantee
We intend to use this blog as a replacement to the newsletter that was published in the past. So it will become a vehicle for groups to share information on progress at their sites, new findings and on general characteristics of what they are studying and the unique attributes of their study. We hope this first blog post will catalyze and recruit groups to submit short and concise summaries and narratives of ongoing work at their sites that can be shared among the community.
As a micrometeorologist, I relish the opportunity to see a cross section of sites across the network . I always find visits instructive and informative to get a better gauge on issues like topography, fetch, system setup and to learn more about the different ecosystems and climate spaces that we are studying as a group.
The AsiaFlux meeting in the Philippines (August, 2014) afforded me the opportunity to visit the rice tower of Maricar Carmelito Alberto at IRRI. Since we have a companion rice tower in California, it was important for me to see how rice was grown in Asia. Rice cultivation is a key producer of methane, so this site brings a subset of methane measurements to our network. Here the colleagues are making long term carbon dioxide and methane flux measurements over managed rice and are testing ideas like alternate wetting and drying as a management method to reduce methane emissions.
During the summer of 2014, I had a fellowship to spend 10 days at the Czech Academy of Science in Brno and my local hosts (Michal Marek, Marian Pavelka, Ladislav Sigut ) brought me to visit their growing network of flux sites. The first field trip was to the long term site spruce site of Bily Kriz, which started during Euroflux.
While this site is on challenging terrain, the local investigators have festooned the site with a large network of soil and stem respiration chambers to provide independent measurements of ecosystem respiration. I was impressed with the chamber systems and found that these were some of the best designed and constructed soil and stem chambers I have ever seen. More of us should use the Czech design. With this system of independent efflux measurements they are better able to understand biases of night fluxes in rugged terrain. The other great thing about this site is that there is an inn, several hundred meters from the tower, which serves fantastic local Czech beer.
c80f0f1006