Teachable Moments in Canada

While chaperoning the ski trip to Québec for the past five days, I was reminded of the value field trips have for our students. A virtual tour, a classroom lecture, the best-made documentary films -- all pale in comparison to actually going out in the world.

Travel to foreign countries provides exceptional educational value, but any trip to a new place with different scenery, culture or lifestyle makes a strong first-hand impact on students.

On our trip, we had the added benefit of a language barrier. Not an intimidating barrier, but the kind where our English-speaking students could try to get by in French, with the safety net of everyone there speaking English as a second language if the need arose. But the language barrier opened up a lot of experiences and opportunities for teachable moments for our students.

Some students struggled to pronounce French words and sentences, others continued to speak English. Some believed that attempting to speak the language showed respect, others believed that butchering it would show a lack of respect. None of our students was rude or a bad ambassador for our school or country, but we noticed frequently that we were louder than other people around us. We discussed in small groups how that might be perceived by the Québécois, to hear a group of people speaking loudly in a public place, using a different language. How would WE feel about that behavior in our hometown? The teachable moments were everywhere.

As I said, none of our students ever meant any disrespect, but it was easy to see how the "ugly American" stereotype takes root. If we were gathered in a hotel lobby, restaurant, ski lodge, or even an historic church, there were usually many of us. When many teenagers are having conversations at a regular volume, it easily sounds amplified with the size of the group. When that language is a foreign one, it must sound that much louder. I noticed our foreign-born and foreign-exchange students, as well as all the adult chaperones, would hang back from the large group in these cases. What made all of us notice the volume of our group, but most of our American students miss it?

The conversations we chaperones had with our students about the perceptions of others could ONLY have happened in earnest by actually being there in Québec City. The same goes for countless other teachable moments we encountered:

1) The (at a minimum!) one thousand questions the French teacher chaperone answered from students who wanted to know how to say words or phrases to communicate better

2) The questions about exchange rate, and how best to maximize the value of our money on the trip

3) The discussions about cultural differences

4) The architecture and design of Québec City

5) The procedures for crossing the border between countries

6) The similarities we found between our words, languages, cultures, and expressions,

and -- here's my personal favorite (and the technology tie-in, too) --

7) The "how much longer until we get there?" question, which plagues ski trip chaperones non-stop if they let it, but goes away quickly when it is answered with, "Figure it out for yourself; you have access to GPS, you know where we're going, you can see our rate of speed on the dashboard right there, and hey look, there's a sign out the window that tells you where we are right now. Figure it out!"

You know, teach a person to fish...

There were too many teachable moments to even recall half of them to write in this blog. The chaperones enjoyed the questions (*most of the time) because they provided opportunities to really teach in a lasting way, as the students were learning from their experience.

I write about this today because we all know what programs are the first to go when budgets get tight. Field trips, art, music, sports, and other programs that allow for this type of experiential learning -- basically, the best stuff for the real world.

We have to document our successes to remind ourselves how many great teachable moments can't happen without getting out there first hand and experiencing the world.