You Ever Notice...and What's the Deal...

[MuppetSpot]

The only time that they had a fun field trip in school from my generation was whenever the upperclassman would get to go to a theme park

 

[CoolGuy1013]

The closest I ever got were school trips to the zoo (to learn about animals, obviously), a park (again, to learn about nature), and a movie theater (to see a nature documentary on bears).
All had an underlying educational purpose, and I’m not even gonna mention the career centers.

 

[Any Del]

For me most of my school field trips were educational. And enjoyed ever bit of it.

 

[D'Snowth]

All had an underlying educational purpose, and I’m not even gonna mention the career centers.

Ah yes, I remember in 8th grade, we had a field trip to one of Kimberly-Clark's corporate offices here in town, with the sole purpose for us to shadow their office workers for a day to gain some real-world corporate experience . . . basically, we just sat alongside them in their cubicles while they spoke to clients and customers on speaker phones.

 

[LittleJerry92]

Yeah, all of my field trips have been educational, but there were definitely moments I enjoyed the places I went to, especially instances like the Museum of Science or New England Aquarium, etc.

 

[D'Snowth]

Oh, don't me wrong, some of the field trips I've been on over the years have certainly been fun: the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge, the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, our own local art museum, Cade's Cove, etc. But, again, regardless of how fun the field trips and the locations we went to were, they were still for educational purposes, and/or lesson plans (for example, the field trip to Cade's Cove was for my 8th grade Video Production class to learn how to film outdoors on location and what have you), they were never strictly just for amusement and/or entertainment . . . if we were going to have school days like that, they were pretty much still in the classroom, and we'd watch a movie, have a party, or just goof off in class, and it was usually for special occasions (Halloween, Valentine's Day, the day before spring or winter breaks, etc.)

 

[minor muppetz]

When I was a kid, I didn't really notice the field trips being educational. I was always excited because it meant we got to spend most of the day out of school (so I find it odd on television when characters tend to dislike these trips). I don't remember many times when we were required to write about the trip or take any kind of quiz/test based on it.

In sixth grade we got to go to a theme park one time. Each year in middle school we went to a local science center, so obviously that's educational (that place also had an IMAX theater, so we'd always watch whatever IMAX film was playing), but at least one of those times after the trip, we went to the mall for lunch and they had an indoor theme park for us to play at (we weren't allowed to go to the stores and shop). There were trips when we went to the zoo. We also had a field trip for when we were about to enter middle school (I was thinking we did for high school as well, but now I remember that high school had a special tour day on a Sunday). I'm thinking field trips were most common in elementary school, then a little less common in middle school, and then a lot more scarce in high school (and usually just confined to one class period, there were only a few class trips that took up most of the school day).

 

[Any Del]

Some of the field trips throughout middle school to college I had assignments dedicated to the trips we've went on. Either summaries, compare and contrast and such.

 

[fuzzygobo]

We had a lot of field trips in grade school to various Revolutionary War sites.
Places George Washington went.
Washington’s Crossing in Trenton, Jockey Hollow where his troops camped out for a few winters, several homes he lived in, we have Revolutionary history up the wazoo.

8th grade was always a three day trip to Washington DC. Got to see all the monuments, the Capitol, the White House (Reagan was president then), the Smithsonian, it was all good. I really liked the Air and Soace Museum.
We had one afternoon we could go anywhere we wanted. Some kids went to Chinatown because you could buy fireworks there.

Our senior year, if you took Physics, you could go to Six Flags Great Adventure. You went on various rides to find out how fast this coaster went, how many g’s this drop would be, etc.

We also went into New York a lot to various museums. The Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, etc.The best was the Haydn Planetarium. You saw this light show of all the stars and planets.
My very first field trip in Kindergarten, they took us to a petting zoo. We each got these little baby bottles of milk to feed the sheep and goats. One lamb would drink from your bottle, and another would push him out of the way to get some. It was the cutest thing to see this baby billy goat go “Baaaahhh!” You wanted to take him home with you.

 

[D'Snowth]

One thing I've noticed about most syndicated comic strips is that they usually have two separate continuities: one for the daily strips, and one for the Sunday strips. I can understand why, though: it could be that some newspapers may carry a strip during the week, but not in their Sunday funnies, or vice-versa . . . so, say if a comic had an ongoing storyline that carried on for a number of weeks, if your newspaper only published that particular on Sundays, there'd be nearly a week's worth of story you would be missing out on if the same continuity carried on with the daily and Sunday strips. Although it's not unusual for a comic to have ongoing storylines during their Sunday strips as well, they do usually seem kind of few and far between compared to the daily strips.