This was our final day in DC and it ended up not being the best. The night prior I inadvertently created some tensions between myself and a few of the parent chaperones that came along. The biggest problem was that the trip was much too fast-paced for them; they weren’t use to the pace of city life. Their frustration and sometimes confusion with the fast-paced nature of Metro trains and city life in general got directed at me, I think.

That frustration got exponentially worse each day because I had a schedule that optimized our time and required a decent amount of walking, which was another problem. I hadn’t realized that walking would have posed the problem that it did, but I should have stepped back to think about how in Greenville people never just go walking to places. By this day the parents were pretty upset with me, and their demands for a slower-paced day made us too late for our last chance to see the inside of the Capitol.

We had five hours left in the city before our train ride, which meant we had time for one activity before visiting their Congressman. We basically all chose the Air and Space Museum because the zoo would require a lot of walking and it would be cold out.

The Air and Space Museum was a pretty good time. It gave me lots of opportunities to talk about a lot of the science concepts we had studied in class.

One thing that some kids really enjoyed and made others bored out of their minds was the presentation on the International Space Station. The presenter called students from our class up several times for the show.

We then made the half-mile walk to Congressman Bennie Thompson’s office, which was apparently too much for some of the parents. When we got into his office, we were informed that the congressman wasn’t in his office at the moment, but that we could speak with one of his aides. The aide that we spoke with was actually pretty interesting and a good role-model for the kids. He talked about growing up in the Delta and what he did to get involved with politics. As we were having our chat with him, in came Bennie Thompson. The students and the parents enjoyed meeting him very much. He told us about what he was doing to fight eco terrorism and other projects related to rural Mississippi.

Then it was back to Union Station and off to Charlottesville, VA. We got to Union Station and I sent the kids and the parents down to the food court, knowing that they had to be done quickly because we had a train to catch in less than thirty minutes. I, meanwhile, went to talk to Amtrak about our group seating and the man informed me that I needed to get my group and get to him immediately. I knew that one way or another, any shred of credit I had with the parents would be gone after this, but I had no real choice. I ran and urgently told them that we had to get to our train as soon as possible. Everybody hurried and we got to the train, but the parents were pissed. I tried to explain what happened, but it did no good. Then we sat on the tracks for upwards of an hour doing nothing and I looked like an idiot.

When we got to Charlottesville we had to carry our luggage up a ton of stairs to get to the street and then catch the free trolley to our hotel –two things that parents were not enthusiastic about. When we finally got to the Red Roof Inn, it turned out that they didn’t have an extra roll-out bed for Brianna, which upset her a ton. All the adults were officially mad at me. On top of that, there was no continental breakfast, which had been advertised when I booked the rooms. Awesome.

As it turned out, there was thankfully an extra roll-away bed for Brianna. One crisis averted, only six more to fix. I tried talking to the parents, but they responded with such vitriol that I just left them well alone and went to sleep on the floor of my room.

The operation the next day with the parents was basically to sit them down for hours while we took the kids around in Charlottesville. In other words, the parents had completely stopped participating in the trip out of protest or anger.

The question you might now be asking is: what would you have done differently, Ryan? The answer to that is that I would have done nothing differently as far as planning and executing the trip. That aspect of the trip was as best it could be. Sure, there were some scheduling problems that couldn’t be accounted for, but I jammed as much educational enrichment as I could into the trip.

What I would have done differently would have been to take teachers instead of parents. Teachers would likely have been able to keep up. Plus, they’d be more helpful in managing kids than some of the parents that came. If a parent really wanted to go, I’d strongly emphasize how much walking would be involved and hopefully scare them off. Some of the parents on my trip were expecting a vacation, as opposed to a field trip. Making a clear delineation would be key. Other student groups in the Delta employ this strategy, more or less. After I had done the trip I heard that other groups had similar problems with parents and decided to opt out of having parent chaperones. I wish I had been given that advice earlier.

Tomorrow: Racial Politics, Tour of Grounds, and Back to Greenville