Daily Dose of English 166
Field Trips
Daily Dose of English 166
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about field trips. Again, another kind of fun topic that I think would just be a little bit interesting and potentially give you a bit of an insight into American culture and what it's like to be there. I mean, I think field trips are a thing in other countries as well. They like have to be, right? It's a, well, okay, what are they? So field trip is in school, usually when you're younger, so maybe elementary school, when you go with a teacher, during school time, somewhere interesting usually to learn. And that's a field trip, right? So the idea is that you're going out into the field, which is like the real world to explore something. So a really common field trip in the US is going to the zoo to go see the animals. And that is a, I think a lot of, classes that have a zoo in their city are gonna go to the zoo for a field trip. That's a very standard field trip. If you ever go to the zoo during a school day, you'll probably see a group of kids there from a class. And that's actually also a pretty fun trip because you get to see animals and you get to hang outside with your friends for a while and it's an unserious school day. I think I haven't really paid attention, and I haven't gone to school in other countries, so I don't really know if field trips are a thing in other places, but I would guess that they are. It's actually pretty easy to go out with... Kids, but like it's not that difficult So it's not like a there's a huge been a huge advantage to having a like a big Rich country like the u.s. I feel like anything with a decent Schooled network and interesting things to do could pretty easily have interesting field trips I could see There being issues depending on like, if you're going somewhere really rural, if you go to school somewhere like where there's hardly anybody to, there's nothing to go see, I could see that being difficult or I don't know, maybe there's other difficulties that I'm just not thinking of. Probably funding is also one thing, right? If schools are underfunded, they probably don't have the energy to take kids to go do something fun. But yeah, I definitely enjoyed field trips as a kid because they are, like I said, they sort of take the pressure off the school day, because you're going to be out for most of the day doing something interesting, hanging out outside, you get to hang out with your friends, and you get to see whatever interesting thing. And I think they're really fun. or I remember them being fun. I haven't gone in years, so I think they're probably still fun. And I've been on lots of different kinds of field trips. I was lucky enough to go somewhere where we had lots of different field trips, different kinds of field trips, different lengths. So like I said, we definitely went to the zoo once or twice, which is very easy, quick, that's probably a day. But then we also did longer overnight field trips where we went for a couple days or even a week as a class to go do something more interesting, longer term and that sort of thing. One that I remember fairly distinctly was called Potlatch I don't remember how old I was, but I must've been like in, ooh, like fourth grade or something like that. So pretty young. And we went essentially out to like a little farm ranch thing. There weren't very many animals, but the idea, it was out of the city overnight. We had like some bunk beds. We stayed in little cabins. We did interesting activities during the day. But I mostly remember, the only real thing that I remember is that that's where I learned to play the game Magic, which I then played for another decade after that. And so that's the only thing that I remember about that. Me and three of my friends, actually, because my best friend, or a friend at that time discovered the game through his babysitter and then he brought the game to play with us at the potlatch and we were just in inside the entire time because one of my other friends dad had played in the past as well so he also kind of knew and so we were just super drawn to this game instead of like being outside and that sort of thing. But that was a fun field trip. because of that. I also remember another longer one where we went to a farm and I remember this very specifically because, again, it was overnight. But the thing that I remember is that my best friend at the time was having a very bad time. He didn't want to go out. He really wanted to be back home. He missed his parents. He missed his family. He was feeling very homesick. And I didn't want him to feel bad, and so I stayed with him, also pretending to be homesick. But I actually really wanted to go outside and do something. But it ended up being fine. He got over it, and we had a good time. But I remember that for that specific memory. I remember the food was also pretty good, but that's about it. Those are like longer overnight field trips. Those aren't real true field trips. Those are more like class trips, I'd say. A field trip, like a real one, is usually within a day. So like I said, going to the zoo, or I also remember a fun one that we, I think I did a couple times with my class, which is called the Rice Museum. Yes, rice like the food. However, the museum did not have rice that was the last names, or last name of the owners. who were just a regular family and it was basically just a house, a big house, but they collected rocks and minerals from all over the world, all different kinds of interesting rocks and minerals. And so their house was actually turned into this museum where you could see just hundreds of different kinds of rocks and minerals and very interesting things and learn about geology and earth sciences. And so that was really cool. I remember that there is a room with a black light because a lot of rocks have luminescent material that you can only really see under ultraviolet light, under a black light. And so that was really cool because you could turn on and off the light and see the rocks just change color. But when they were in normal light, they looked normal. They looked like rocks. But under the black light, they were green and purple and really bright. And it was really cool. Um, and that's a, that's a pretty strong memory that I have about going there with my class, I think a couple times. And the other interesting place that I went to is the St. Helens Museum, because I don't know if I've talked about this before, but Mount St. Helens, Mount St. Helens is a mountain in, I think it's technically in Washington State, not Oregon, but it's basically, it's very close to Portland where I grew up. Yeah, it's in Washington. Um, and it's actually closer to Portland than it is to anything important in, um, in. Oh my God, in Washington, that's what it's called, geez. And it's a volcano that erupted in 1980, 1980, 1980. In 1980, so relatively recently, 25 years ago almost, 45 years ago almost, I said that correctly. 20, oh my God, 45 years ago. And it was a huge, huge eruption. It's one of the, I think, biggest eruptions in the US. Um that ever like in recently I forget exactly I should read more about it, but it was a very big eruption, um, and cause like 57 deaths. It was very, very big, but there's a museum there now and you can learn about the eruption and it's really cool. So we drove out there as a class. We went in, we did like a, we followed a tour from somebody that knows a lot about it and we, we learned about this. We saw the, um, like what happened, because there are videos and things, because it was the 80s. There's actually a really good video on YouTube that collects a bunch of news footage and edited it together. That's hard to say. Edited it together. because it was like going to erupt for months. Like there were months where everybody was like, okay, this thing is going to explode pretty soon. And it took a long time and eventually the final day it really did explode and erupt and it was really interesting. After the fact it was interesting. I think for people that were alive it was very scary to see so much ash and everything hitting the, The cities, too. My mom was in the area at that time and said that, yeah, it was very obvious that something humongous was happening, even though it's very far away. Yeah, that was an interesting field trip that definitely resonated with me. But there's so many different cool field trips and I hope that they continue to be a thing in everywhere that possibly can have them because I think they're really good for kids to get out and explore the world a little bit while they're learning. Yeah, so that's my episode on field trips. Let me know down in the comments below, have you ever gone on a field trip? What was your favorite or most impactful one for you? But thank you very much for listening to this episode and I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode. Have a good one, bye.
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