:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/LB6YFAOGJVBJVLX3MMZWKMMIFU.jpg)
They haven’t happened for the last two years but they’re back. Wonderful, exhausting, much-anticipated, stressful, incandescent and draining school tours. The primary version.
Children so love them. “This happens every year?”, a bunch of incredulous seven-year-olds asked their teacher mid-tour. But then they’d never experienced one before and probably wanted to double-check that this wasn’t just a crazy, delirious once-off.
Excitement levels generally get going the night before. Parents will attest to children heading to bed with great enthusiasm in an effort to turbo-charge through those hours of nothingness and arrive at the departure point all the quicker.
A colleague recalls going to bed in her clothes in anticipation of a school tour the following day, determined as she was to see off the slightest, most infinitesimal chance that she might be late for the bus.
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/ZU666T7JRRALPLRUHRHHE6G54Y.jpg)
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/WPH4BAM4SHQFVLTYX24GORCKRU.jpg)
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/SAITPP74SZBX5KZGBAUDFWJLQU.jpg)
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/5JC53HMTSZHTNCZBZSY65ZLEH4.jpg)
Back in the day, a trip to Dublin Airport was considered a radical option when it came to school tours.
Classes watched planes arriving and taking off and that was pretty much it but to organise such an excursion somehow signalled that the school was modern and forward-looking and preparing its charges for a new, easily accessible world. And maybe it was. A bunch of us ended up emigrating, anyway.
So what is the attraction of a school tour? It’s not really the location. We all know that parents could bring their kids to the same place the following day or week with a very different level of expectation. Maybe it’s to do with leaving the school premises, although pupils have numerous trips to places of local interest throughout the school year. Getting away for the full day is certainly a factor, as is hanging out with friends and the spine-tingling prospect of going on an adventure together, and then there’s the novelty of eating lunch out in the open, although as often as not someone, somewhere will have started in on the contents of their lunch box with the school gates still within sight.
And as for the staff? Even the younger teachers admitted to taking to bed on making it home after a school tour. It’s the non-stop scanning to make sure everyone’s accounted for that takes its toll along with those endless reminders about coats and bags.
Urban legend has it that a bus on a school tour came back with one child extra. Someone met their cousin during the day and invited them back for tea. Of course it’s the frantic staff of the interloper’s school, one child short, that’s at the heart of this tale.
True or not, it’s one of those scenarios that resonates deeply because of its undeniable plausibility.
I was once in a staff room where a teacher talked of heading away on a drinking weekend with his buddies. On the train down, without thinking, he momentarily went into teacher-mode and more specifically teacher-on-a-school-tour-mode. With great enthusiasm, he pointed to the passing countryside and exclaimed, “Look, cows!”
Naturally enough, it became the theme of the weekend.
For me, it will always be about the boy with little English who joined our class mid-year.
We’d organised a trip to the zoo and the child in question, as far as I knew, had never been to a zoo or indeed on a school tour ever before.
“And what are your favourite animals?”, I asked at possibly too regular intervals.
My final query, subsequent to the trip, resulted in him shaking his head in resignation and announcing, “I tell you a hundred time, monkey and giraffe.”
And the thing is, he had.
On a recent tour, the bus pulled away from the school amid shrieks of “It’s started!” and “We’re moving!”, accompanied by a lot of pulling curtains back and forth because who knew curtains existed on a bus before?
The journey was interjected by regular queries as to when we would arrive at our destination. This began roughly 15 minutes in, just when we’d hit the motorway.
A lesson to all that school tours and long distances are not a good combination.
But once we got there, the magic of it all set in. Children got stuck into the activities on offer and at one stage materialised in front of us covered in mud and grinning from ear to ear. It was a glorious sight but far too quickly it was time to clean up and gather belongings as we couldn’t be late arriving back to school.