Activities Week

I have always loved activities week as a teacher. You get to go out on trips, and help the students experience new things and yes, see them in a different light¹. They also get to see you in a different light, which is no bad thing.

What people don’t seem to realise about activities week is the sheer amount of organisation and paperwork that goes into it. I don’t envy the co-ordinator trying to pull it all together as it is a mammoth job, but know that if that’s you, then we (the staff) applaud you and are in your debt. All those risk assessments, worrying about buses and dealing with parents who don’t understand payment schedules must take a toll.

Over my years, I have been on some fantastic trips, some deathly dull ones, but rarely on ones that ended in disaster². Let’s not focus on the dull ones³, but look at the great ones.

My favourite trip was always to Alton Towers. We would leave Devon at around 6 a.m. and get to Alton Towers around 11 ish, and stay for two days, with a night in a hostel, then the return journey after a full day in the park. It would always make me laugh⁴ when, for the whole journey up several of the lads would be giving it the big one about which ride they were going on, and then the doors to the bus opened in the park car park, and the first thing we’d hear would be the screams of everyone on rides.

One year, a student couldn’t be put into a friendship group and we wouldn’t let him walk around by himself, so made him come with me and another teacher. We told him we were going on all the rides, so it would be fine. I felt really sorry for him, as everyone ditched him as soon as we got there, and he spent the first hour moanng about everything. We were in a queue for a ride and he complained about the heat, the length of the queue, the price of drinks⁵ and how he thought this ride was rubbish anyway⁶. It was getting to the point where we were realising why the others had all ditched him, but then we did the ride.

It utterly transformed him. He was bouncing after it, saying how great it was, calling me and the other teacher ‘mate’ and ‘the lads’ and he led the way to the other rides for the rest of the day with no more moaning about the price of anything or the length of the queues. When we got to the hostel that night, he was talking to the others about what a great day he’d had, and how many rides he’d been on and he wasn’t alone after that⁷. That two day trip led to some really good friendships for a lad who had struggled previously.

We always had an unofficial competition to see who could look the most bored in the ride photo too. This was my good friend Vince and I’s attempt on Smiler⁸:

When I worked in London, we used to take year 7 away for a week in North Devon. One day me and a mate⁹ took a group surfing. The previous day, another friend reckoned he stayed up on the surf board for 3.2 seconds, so we were both determined to beat that. We didn’t, but we didn’t tell him that. When the lesson was done, we returned to the mini-bus and the kids were changing out of wetsuits, so me and my mate decided to go behind the mini-bus so we could change in relative privacy out of sight of the kids. We didn’t know there was a golf-course behind us¹⁰, and we certainly didn’t know the golfers could see us getting changed.

That same trip, we arrived after a tortuous journey from South West London to North Devon, and the kids were letting off steam whilst we all had a well deserved cup of tea in the common room. The centre staff were looking after the kids and putting them into their groups for the week. One lad was being a little difficult, not majorly, but he was winding a couple of the others up, so I opened the staff room window and asked him to come to the door. He mumbled and grumbled, but eventually came round to the door and knocked. No-one answered because we’d all decided to hide. He opened the door, called out, then went back outside. By this point, we were all back in our original seats, acting like we hadn’t moved. I bellowed at him to come round to the door, and of course we all hid again.

Bless him, he did eventually cotton on and laughed about it later. I did manage to get through to him we were all tired and perhaps he could be kinder. He didn’t put a foot wrong for the rest of the week and had a great time. Now obvioulsy, this could have gone wrong, but I knew the kid well (he was in my tutor group) and I knew he would take it as a joke. This is the power of relationships in teaching, and the willingness to have a laugh with the kids. I really hope we never, ever lose that as a profession.

Activities weeks are in danger of becoming a thing of the past as we push the kids to achieve more and more. All the stress of OFSTED, league tables, publishing results, parental complaints mean we look to squeeze every bit of juice from the students. However, school trips remain a highlight of many peoples schooling and they do teach kids things. Measuring what has been learnt is nigh on impossible¹¹, and so it is easy to dismiss activities week as irrelevant, or an excuse for a jolly.

It is so much more than that.

Working with kids is meant to be fun. Never forget that.

Until next time.

FOOTNOTES

1. Bit of a theme for the last few weeks. ↩︎
2. Thankfully. I am a very lucky guy. ↩︎
3. Although special mention must be made for the visit to a silicon factory, the highlight of which was the guide telling us they could insert silicon into a penis too. It was a trip from a boys school, so cue much hilarity about who needed the silicon. ↩︎
4. Hmm. I’m possibly a bit of a sadist. Didn’t know that. ↩︎
5. All absolutely fair points, to be honest. ↩︎
6. The ride is Rita, The Queen Of Speed – one of the fastest rides in Alton Towers. I love it. ↩︎
7. He even said me and the other teacher were ‘cool’ which means he was the master of bullshit. ↩︎
8. Smiler is a really extreme ride. We tried to do it without holding on too. Nope, couldn’t do that! ↩︎
9. Shoutout to Rich! ↩︎
10. The beach is Westward Ho! which is the only place in the U.K. to have an ! in its name. It was named after the book by Charles Kingsley. ↩︎
11. How do you measure ‘is now less of a dick?’ ↩︎