The power of pressing on

Last week, 70 6th graders, four other teachers, the principal and I went to West Texas for our end of year field trip. This four-day-three-night outing was the culminating reward for kids who did the right thing all year, as measured by our weekly paycheck system. It's a long-standing tradition in our charter network. Some schools (like the one next door) take their sixth graders on a week-long backpacking trips through Utah. We at our school boarded a charter bus on Monday and headed a mere seven hours toward the setting sun and the rolling gold hills between Marfa and Fort Davis.

Step behind the scenes of trips like these and what you find are multiple field trips all strung together by the teachers to make what we hope is a thrilling whole--perfect for inspiring good behavior and academic habits in the future. We kept the kids busy horseback riding, ropes-course climbing, orienteering (Yes! Hand out the coordinates! The class of 2017 will now never be lost as long as they live. And have a compass handy...), exploring and, of course, swimming and riding in the bus. Yes. The bus. At my old school in San Francisco, we joked that we could save a ton of money by simply renting a bus, driving the kids around all day, then finding someplace for them to swim for a few hours. They'd be happy as little pre-teen clams. Not surprisingly, this affection for sitting with friends in large, moving vehicles followed by a quick dip in the pool is also embraced by Texas middle schoolers. Yet we insisted on dragging them away from their peers and forcing them to sit through a (thrilling!) talk about the solar system at the famous McDonald Observatory (just down the road from where we were staying) and learn how to ride a zip line and manage their daily routine while staying in a cabin with 10 closest friends. I mean, really!

We also made them climb a mountain. Of course we did. And it was there, at the end of the year at about 5,000 feet above sea level, that I realized that the kids really do listen on a very deep level. A level that transcends physical comfort. A level that promotes determination and grit. For real! Sometimes I feel that my job, stripped down to its most basic level, involves cajoling children to do things they really don't want to do for hours at a time.

Last week on Guadalupe Peak in the heart of West Texas, I was sure of it. And it was a good thing.

I hiked the mountain (beautiful, highly recommended) with four kids who did not want to be there. I ended up with these four after confusion with another teacher left them alone on the trail, group-less. I went back to retrieve them, and we set off together. They were not in the best shape. They had absolutely no experience hiking a trail with any elevation gain, to say nothing of 3,000 feet. We did a few switchbacks, and they would collapse on the nearest boulder to catch their breath. But never once did they suggest, even for one minute that we 1) stop and wait for the groups ahead of us to come down or 2) give up and head back early. Not once. Neither did they whine (at all) nor do much dramatic moaning. Tired, out of breath and (for at least two) very homesick, they kept going up. I wanted to give them all a medal. I wanted to call up some teacher hotline and give a full report. In the minds of these kids, there was no backing down. The thought didn't even occur to them. And, believe me, plenty of other thoughts did.

JS: Ms. R, what if we fall off the mountain?
AC: What if we get lost? Are we lost? I think we're lost...
AA: What does it mean if you are hiking, and see one of those big ugly birds (vultures) are flying over your head? Does that mean you're going to die in two hours?
JG: Do you think when we get to the top, we will be able to see to Mexico? Cause we're close to Mexico, right?
Me: Where do I start?

Walk, sit, walk, sit...we didn't make it to the summit. That wasn't the point. We kept going up. I'm ashamed to admit it now, but I kept bracing myself for the inevitable loss of spirit, and it never came. Every time we turned a corner, I'd pause and exclaim about the view, the flat golden plains stretching out before us, the jagged peaks of this desert range behind us, nothing but a few windmills and the dots of small towns as far as the eye could see. For five hours of almost constant uphill switchbacks. It would have been a tough hike for anyone, to say nothing of four stocky 6th graders in old tennis shoes or (worse) Converse high tops.

Climbing mountains, as regular readers know, is our favorite metaphor at school for the process of being the first in your family to go to college. Because both are hard and require persistent effort over an extended period of time. It was amazing to see this metaphor in action on a literal mountain slope, to see kids pressing on (our class motto) not because they wanted to, not because I was forcing them, but because they had somehow figured out that there was nowhere to go but up--and not one else could do it for them.