Dateline: Westminster Elementary, Westminster, SC - Spring, 1989–It was a four-burner, lipstick meltin,’ sidewalk steamin,’ late spring day at the schoolhouse. In my second year of teaching fourth grade I was about to embark on my first field trip in “the big cheese.” The big cheese was the official in-house name given to the school bus by my son, Mike.
This day, with the temperature in the 90’s, the un-air conditioned big cheese was in danger of becoming Cheez Whiz. Three buses awaited the onslaught of one hundred fourth graders. Our trip would take us to Roper Mountain Science Center. The speed governors were set at a snail’s pace. We anticipated an all day affair.
After steaming our way to Greenville, we landed on the new black asphalt at Roper Mountain. Immediately upon arrival, one of our fourth graders fell over in a dead faint from heat exhaustion. After reviving her, the teacher and her ailing student raced to the ER in the car of a parent who had followed us. The child was later deemed fit to travel back home in the same day.
The rest of us watched the new observatory being constructed. We also listened and learned from the various programs and exhibits. The return trip was not without excitement. In a state of meltdown, we traveled back to school. One of my students became nauseous from an overdose of Twinkies in her bag lunch and the extreme heat. She lost her cookies in the aisle of the bus just as we hit the Easley city limits. I knew I needed to cool her off to keep her from flashing again.
We lacked a vital item on this luxury bus–ice. The two parents in the car behind us had ice in their cooler. The children and I signaled to them at the stoplight that we needed help. As the car pulled to the side of the bus, I frantically screamed, “Ice, ice!”
In “Dukes of Hazzard” fashion we managed a rolling ice transfer from her car up to the bus. I’ve never been coordinated enough to accomplish such a feat before or since.
I’m sure the students gathered important scientific information from our trip. They were amazed at the building of the new night sky observatory and listened intently to the field trip guide. However, when the field trip reaction writing took place the next day, the subject they most remembered didn’t take place at the Science Center. They somehow focused on one teacher with two fourth graders holding onto her legs, dangling from the waist out of a window of the “big cheese,” grabbing a plastic bag of ice in midair.
Later field trips found students requesting an encore performance from this teacher. Their pleas were met with a resounding no, but I sometimes wonder, could I do that again?