I'm back....and YOKA goes to MOCA

Whew! It's been a while since I posted.  I'll try to bring you up to speed, but first some comments about my field trip last week:

Today the art teacher Mr. Greene and I took about seventy students to the Museum of Contemporary Art on Grand Avenue.  Before that we also visited the Central Library on Fifth Street, and then we walked up the Library Stairs to Bunker Hill and MOCA.  After visiting the museum we had lunch in the Water Court.  All in all it was a wonderful day.  The students were well behaved and enjoyed the new experiences, new places, new environments.

This was our second field trip as part of the Pacific Standard Time project in education.  In December we went to Disney Hall to hear the LA Phil rehearsing for their evening concert.  I love to take students on outings like this.  You can almost literally see them stretching their wings as they encounter a new part of the big world around them.  There is NO substitute for this kind of exposure, and it’s a real loss to our children that field trips have become so rare.

A couple of aspects of this trip made a big impression on me.  First of all, their reaction to the art in MOCA was perfectly appropriate to first seeing Rothko or Pollock or Segal or a bent piece of wire or a blue plastic tube.  “This is art?”  “I could do this!” “My little brother could make this!”  “This doesn’t even look like a person!” etc.  But they looked, they discussed, they studied these things.  Who knows what thoughts lodged deep in their minds, only to emerge later as they mature and remember that strange painting they saw on a field trip in 7th grade?

Then at lunch I watched as they sat around the tables at the Water Court among the office workers and executives from the towers of Bunker Hill, eating lunch, chatting, laughing, having a good time.  Mariano was so excited to have had TWO frappacinos, and Luis discovered Angel’s Flight and showed his friends.  At moments like these I can imagine them as grown ups, and that definitely gives a good spin to the backbreaking labor of teaching them in seventh grade.

So although a field trip is a long day on my feet, with a lot of preparation and no duty free moments, it’s well worth the effort.  I hope there will be many more.