** Click here for Episode 154 **
Don your mufti, gather your packed lunches and board the coach for a question from Andrew from Leeds:
My sister (13), has just come back from a school trip to lean about water usage and recycling – to a sewage works. Yes – it was as unpleasant and foul-smelling as it sounds, and after lunch, over half the kids refused to get off the coach. I think the smell was worse then my school trip to a Camembert factory a few years back.
You’re forgetting, Andrew, that school trips aren’t supposed to be fun. Even the ones that are supposed to be fun are not fun, because you’re there to learn, which of course is mutually exclusive to fun. Hence during my school trip to Chessington World of Adventures, we were forbidden to go on any rides because we had to fill in a questionnaire about wildlife. What did I learn from that? Some useful facts about wildlife? NO; we learnt the more important lesson that adults are cruel and life isn’t all fun and games, just as your sister learnt that life can be a big vat of shit.
So, answer me this – what’s the worst school trip you’ve been on when at school?
Readers, we sense you’ve suffered far worse than us during our adventures to the power stations and wildfowl centres of southern England. Take a trip to the comments to tell us about your dumbest, dreariest, or downright dangerous school trips. Best one gets to sit up front next to Teacher on the ride home.
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Answer Me This! Podcast 
November 4, 2010 at 1:15 pm |
I was a weirdo who liked school trips that made us learn. Museums, factories, nuclear power plants, zoos, a working convent, I loved them all. Also, being an American, no teacher would deny us our god-given right to ride every tilt a whirl and roller coaster if we were so lucky to end up at a theme park.
The only unpleasant field trip I remember was to one of those places that recreated the pioneer days of Wisconsin. It was built like a small town, with a school and a doctor’s house and a general store, and a few houses of varying degrees of economic prosperity to compare and contrast the living standards in 1870. The doctor’s house was most interesting, with its terrible tools of torture used for “health”.
So what was so bad? Well, we went on this trip right before Christmas. In Wisconsin. It was FREEZING. The only heat any building had was from the fireplaces, and the poor people who worked there planted their costumed asses right in front of the flames, denying heat to the visitors. As this was 7th grade, many kids were too cool to bring hats or gloves on the trip. Like me. We hiked around the town from house to house for a couple of hours, and by the end my ears, toes and face were numb. On the bus back to school, kids were huddled next to each other for warmth. Disastrous field trip, St. Philip the Apostle. The nuns should have known better.
November 4, 2010 at 12:33 pm |
Hello.
I was taken to a Viking village somewhere in Suffolk for a school trip when I was about 7, and we were taken to look at their little houses.
We had a supply teacher that day. He didn’t know the class, so didn’t notice leaving one of the children behind. Me.
I was left in one of these smelly little houses (full of animal skins which creeped me out) until one of the staff members (in full Viking dress) found me crying. By this point, the bus had left! They got about 5 miles down the road before the other teachers realised I wasn’t there and came back for me.
Needless to say, we never had that supply teacher again…
November 4, 2010 at 12:08 am |
Hi Helen and Olly,
As a school trip, we were taken to a cardboard box factory, no, i’m not joking, and we learnt how they were assembled, which took about 30mins, then we ate lunch, got a free pencil & went back to school for 2 more lessons.
WHAT A FUN DAY!