Go Outside, Meet Your Students

“All these kids … you must be brave,” said the man in hiking gear.

After a sunny but cold day on the beach punctuated by a trudge through sandpaper wind, I was plodding downhill with the stragglers from my hiking group. The more energetic among them galloped to the end, past the curious hiker.

Our crew—52 ninth-graders, teachers and chaperones—was spending three nights and four days in the outdoors. Brave is what some people call it.

But I’ve been here before and I know the benefits.

At Clem Miller Environmental Education Center [2] in the Point Reyes National Seashore [3], we do all of our own cooking and cleaning in addition to the programming. That means instead of working our regular 8- to 10-hour days, we’re on duty 24 hours. But the real work happens long before we arrive.

To begin with, there is the district paper work, parent meetings, parent phone calls, student orientations and the coordination of the adult teachers and chaperones. We work up a menu and find cheap ways to purchase the food. We rent or borrow sleeping bags for students who don’t have them. We write sub plans and find coverage for the classes we leave behind. This is just the short list of tasks to be completed before the bus arrives. Oh, did I mention making arrangements for leaving our families for the week?

Bravery is not what brings us back year after year. It’s that we finally get to reach students on a completely different level, one that the outdoor classroom facilitates more easily than the traditional four walls.

For example, Joel struggles in his classes. He has an IEP, but all year we’ve struggled to adequately modify lessons for him. We considered not bringing him with us for fear that some of the acting out we see in class would play itself out on the trip. We saw the opposite. Joel came alive in the outdoors. When I taught him about the flower of a plant called Ceanothus [4], which lathers up with water just like soap, he excitedly taught the rest of his classmates. When a colleague held up a snake for students to see, Joel not only kissed it, but also sought out other snakes to identify, compare and snap photos of with the awe of a child—which, I was reminded, Joel still is. In his neighborhood he has to act grown up, or at least tough. At Point Reyes, I saw the real Joel for the first time. He is not shut down and reticent, but curious. Not only that, but he was the most helpful student in the group. If he had not gone on this trip, we would not have known that about him.

What a trip like this offers our students is safety and the freedom to explore. Between the dining hall and the cabins is a large grassy field where we spent several hours a day just playing. Another student told me that this was his favorite part. He said, “I liked playing outside because it was calm and it felt like I didn’t have to worry about anything except trying to catch the ball.” It may have been the first time he’d been able to play catch without looking over his shoulder. Similarly, a young woman whose entire family is wrapped up in gang life admitted, “I enjoyed … just being out of Oakland and away from all the lights and cars, not feeling like you’re in danger of getting hit by a car or getting shot. At the most you had to worry about getting mosquito bites.”

My colleagues and I are usually beyond exhausted when we return from our week outside. But by then we’ve also seen our students a new way, a more complete way. I only wish we could do it earlier in the school year. With only a few weeks left, I now know that the secret to getting Joel involved is making him a helper and giving him tools to teach his classmates. I still might not reach him inside school, but at least I know where he learns best.

Once we’ve been outside for a week with our students, it’s hard to imagine not having this opportunity. It doesn’t take bravery. It takes tremendous planning. It takes time. It takes a robust budget or ambitious grant writing. It takes a cooperative staff. And it takes love.

Thomas is an English teacher in California.