Pick Your Cliche

Time to tie up the loose ends... get my butt in gear... wrap this puppy up -- however you want to put it, I'm bound and determined to finish the DC08 blog within the next 60 hours.

What to say about this year's trip? I wouldn't have thought for anything that it'd take me three weeks to finally bite the bullet and finish the blog, though I know from experience that once back home it's hard to find the time to reflect properly about a trip. In fact, the only reason I'm able to spend time now reflecting and sorting pictures is that I'm traveling with my family to a funeral. Not a happy occasion, to be sure, but I'm glad for the chance to think back over this year's DC trip -- about what worked and what didn't.

Though there’s definitely still room to improve, in a number of ways I think we put together a better trip this year than either of the past two years. I'm especially glad that we spent minimal time in shopping mall food courts and gave the kids an authentic taste of the city of Washington, DC. As I've talked with folks over the last couple weeks whose students attended the trip at other schools, I've been a little amused at how surprised they are that we actually walked the streets of DC. At least two asked me, "Isn't DC the murder capital of the United States?" Um, not for about fifteen years. In fact, our midwestern neighbor of Flint tops the list of number of murders per capita. Kids are much more likely to be injured or killed in automobile accidents (and see here) back home with their families than exploring the areas of DC that we picked out for them. On the other hand, we chaperones were deeply aware of in parentis locos (no kids that doesn't mean your parents are crazy, but roughly translated I think it might mean we were crazy to take on the responsibility for 49 of you at once...) One of the reasons this trip was more stressful than the past two is that taking that many kids to outdoor venues like Dupont Circle, Adams Morgan, Eastern Market and Chinatown does indeed feel more risky than turning them loose in a shopping mall. I'm not actually sure if kids are statistically safer in shopping mall than, say, in the circle at Dupont. I imagine it depends on the time of day, etc. But at the very least there's less potential for kids to wander outside preset boundaries in a shopping mall than in a neighborhood. Without cell phones, I'd have to reconsider allowing kids out and about town, at least as young as these kids are.

So that's one major strength of the trip, in my opinion. I'll lay out some of the rest of my thoughts in the remaining posts, and I look forward to hearing more from all of you. Once school starts, we'll send out a survey for both guardians and kids that I hope you'll all fill out -- it's feedback from parents and kids over the last two years that has helped to improve the trip.

I've collected several dozen of my favorite pics and I've still got a few vids to put up on YouTube, so I'll spend the next couple days scattering my thoughts amongst the pics and vids.