I chaperoned a field trip to the Detroit Historical Museum for Zach's fourth-grade class yesterday. As always, it was an eye-opening experience riddled with noise, chaos, and unfiltered exposure to the 9-year-old mindset.
The bus ride alone was interesting enough to count as the day's entertainment. The driver came complete with an apparent hangover and was burdened with the personality of a dried-out thorny shrub. Still, she has somehow mastered the art of ignoring the high-decibel shroud of noise coming from the back of her vehicle, and eventually settled into a trance-like state typically only seen in the smoky mystic-huts of southern India.
When a car on the opposite side of the freeway spun out on the ice and hit the dividing wall backwards at high speed, she didn't even flinch.
Zach, who constantly complains that he has no friends at school, was mobbed by three boys who would have clearly fought to the death to sit next to him. The one who was left out (in the end they were only able to squeeze three into the seat) retreated the the back of the bus and cried.
Yeah, no friends.
As the teachers typed away on their Blackberries, I looked around in awe at a brand of exhilaration that only comes to those unburdened with responsibility or worries of mortality.
There was shouting and laughing. Objects were thrown and not caught. Yogurt was spilled on a head over here. Someone crawled under the seat over there.
There was a group of girls in the back singing "100 bottles of beer on the wall" until, in between emails, one of the teachers heard them and made them switch to pop.
There was a very large doe-eyed boy who was interested in my iPhone and asked me a stream of very quiet and polite questions. I later learned that this boy is the school bully. Perhaps he acts differently around parents?
I was assigned Zach and his not-worthy, worshipping friends as my official group. It was my job to make sure these kids returned home on the bus and didn't end up for sale on the internet. This duty I carried out with an iron hand, and my little charges, loud and crazy as they were, never left my side.
The museum, which has much of old Detroit's history on display, was very interesting. Well, to me it was. To the kids it was a thin cut above torture. They were extremely glad to leave the place.
Right up until they discovered they still had to suffer through another hour of school before they could go home.
