Teachers in the Trees

The Friday of our second week of school (October 30th) was a very unique day. Granted, the school has had a unique school year thus far -- nearly an entire new French teaching staff and the same for English (we need a French teacher for the 11th grade, btw -- anyone interested?). Because there are so many new teachers, the teacher board (or something along those lines) decided that the staff needed to spend time together and to get to know one another better.

Solution: cancel school for a day and take the staff on an excursion!

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I'm being serious.

Obviously parents were upset. Older children were pleased. I have to admit that having one less day that week made life better. But, all that is besides the point.

This excursion was top-secret. Only the two teacher that planned it knew what we were doing all day and where. All we were told was to be at school that Friday at 8 AM and to have appropriate outdoor dress.

The bus driver was digging into the secrecy of it all. During the hour and a half long bus ride, he would slow down in front of various spots pretending that we had reached our destination. He also took about three wrong turns...

Towards the end of our drive, consent forms were passed around for us to sign.

This is where we ended up.

Tree Trek is a kind of activity/outdoor camp facility with high ropes courses and zip-lines. Actually, it was pretty cool -- the last time I'd done something like this was back in middle school! Many of the teachers/staff people (there were about 30 of us who decided to go) hadn't done anything like this before. Plus, Mike and I were by far the youngest people there. Many of our teachers are in their 50s. The energy level was high and there was lots of laughter.

We were split into three teams -- Mike and I ended up on the same one. Fortunately, our team got to go first, and were able to do all FIVE courses. They became progressively more difficult and higher. There was jumping across stretches of open air and landing like monkey or spider in a net. One of the later courses involved getting bags of pine cones and stuff across the course.

Some pictures...






















At the end of the day, we took the bus (did I mention that it was a coach bus?) to a nice restaurant where we had a lovely vegetarian meal that also included sundae desserts and after-dinner coffee and drinks.

Not bad for a poor Waldorf school....