Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Ah, kids...

Last week a group of 150+ kindergarteners visited the museum. We didn’t charge them or anything. The point of the field trip that day was for the kiddos to learn “appropriate museum behavior”, which can be difficult when you are five.

Anyway, the kids all filed into the museum and looked at the various paintings, statues and exhibitions. Attention spans are short at that age, so their visit probably lasted only thirty minutes or so. And there were no problems (except for a gazillion little hand prints on the display cases), save for the following:

The kindergarteners traveled by class in a single file line behind their teacher. Kind of like a row of ducklings following their mother. When it was time to leave the museum, I held open the front door and the teacher and students filed out in an orderly fashion. Except for one little girl that had fallen about 10 feet behind the boy directly in front of her.

With tears in her eyes, she stopped, looked up at me, and declared, “I’m lost!”

Resisting the urge to laugh (please note that there were about five OTHER classes from her school still in the museum at this point, not to mention the seven or eight other kids from her class standing directly behind her), I calmly reassured her that - as long as she kept walking towards the big, yellow school bus - someone would find her.

Sometimes I really love my job...

2 comments:

Heather said...

Hmmm, at my musuem today, we had a large group of 120 4th graders. When they approached the native american displays outside of the main office, they howled and screamed, "I see tits! I see tits!" Over and over and over again.

The parent chaperones joined in.

It was a banner day for the public school system.

Anonymous said...

Let me just say I still have PTSD from my days handling field trips at the children's museum- one of many reasons why a) I don't volunteer to work our youth concerts and b) why I shall never spawn a child