Prompt #2: A letter to the principal

Dear Ms. Kartridge,

    As a student of Copepod High, I believe field trips to be a beneficial to the student faculty. The first reason being that the students gain knowledge through an interactive teaching method. Second, the teaching faculty is supervising, so the chances of a student’s disappearance are slim to none. Third, and foremost, a field trip is not a day to skip of school, but rather a day where students learn outside of school.

    Many of the members of both the student and teaching faculties believe that a field trip is a free ticket for a student to leave school. This belief is false. A field trip is normally educational during school hours. I have personally attended a fieldtrips during school, but all of them proved to be beneficial to a student’s education. These fieldtrips included college campus seminars, college fairs, museums, and observatories. In addition, our school’s fieldtrips are both free and educational. However, the student’s education always comes first, which is why in order to attend a field trip a student must have the teachers consent. A student who misses a class session to attend a field trip must contact the teacher via email in order to receive that day’s assignments (Article 5, Section VII, of the student conduct code).

    For the most part, fieldtrips in our school are educational. The students do not get randomly dropped off in some secluded area where no supervisor is around. The first rule that comes with field trip consent is that there be multiple supervisors who are responsible for the students going on the trip. One may wonder, how do they know who is on the bus? Or how can a teacher tell if a student is gone? The answer to these questions is simple: a student list. One every bus, there is a supervisor assigned to a specific group of students. Each supervisor is handed a list with the students’ names on it. With this list the one in charge is able to determine who’s on their bus. However, to make sure, the supervisor I obligated to count all the people on the bus, and recoding their information of the current attendees. This system has proven to work for fieldtrips thus far and will continue serve well in the upcoming years.

    What exactly do students learn in their fieldtrips? The true question is: What don’t students learn on fieldtrips? As a student, I know I have absorbed quite a bit of knowledge from attending these trips. Although the topics range, from college information to a variety of historic facts, they did benefit each student in a different way.  In fact, it was through one of these trips that I was inspired to take a profession in the engineering field and attend a university that offered engineering as a major. For this reason, I truly appreciate the privilege students from our school have to in order to attend events that will not only be interesting, but beneficial to their future. 

    Overall, not only are field trips beneficial to students, but coordinated in an organized manner. Eliminating a system as organized as this one would be a major loss for our school. Since, most of our remaining trips are funded by outside college programs, the cost is not something to fret over. In fact, they will help the majority of the students find a career path that will increase the school’s already successful reputation.

 Sincerely,

Amiri Hammy