Spending the last two days of this week taking my students to a nearby “space station” where they can conduct mock NASA missions.
Each field trip lasts half a day, and is tailored to just about perfectly fit the attention span of my middle-schoolers.
So far, the students have enjoyed the trip, although the state’s standards have changed and 8th grade no longer includes any topics involving space. Apparently it is faster to change the state’s science standards than it is to schedule a field trip to this center.
But my first independent job as a student teacher was to escort a similar field trip two years ago … and being there makes me thing often and fondly of a former teaching colleague now an astronaut for NASA.
Advertisement
