1 post tagged “westchester”

I grew up in suburban Westchester county. in the US, your grasp of American history is strongly dependent on where you grew up. For example, in New England American history consists primarily of all events leading up to, and including, the Revolutionary War. This is mostly because walking down the street to the church graveyard to do grave rubbings of fallen Revolutionary soldiers is a much cheaper field trip than anything else. This seems to be fairly standard: my friend Sydney grew up in Alabama where the war was referred to as "The War of Northern Aggression", whereas my friends in the Pacific Northwest spent an inordinant amount of time on Lewis and Clark.

Anyway, the field trips that I can remember clearly are:

1. The Natural History Museum in NYC

2. The Museum of Modern Art in NYC (My parents took us here, so I guess it is not really an official field trip, but it was so my brother could do research for his sixth grade project on James Rosenquist, and I remember it very clearly).

3. The police station (woohoo)

4. The nuclear power plant (Indian Point)

5. A LOT of Revolutionary War-related sites, including graveyards, road markers, broken down old houses, and "George Washington Slept Here" plaques on hotels

And then we did a trip to an outdoorsy place called Hillside in fifth grade, which was a big deal because it was a week, and you spent the whole year on Orienteering and Spelunking. In seventh grade you did Nature's Classroom, which was the same thing but worse, because seventh grade is worse than fifth grade, and in eighth grade you did the Washington Trip, which was awesome because you stayed in HOTELS and got to go to the Smithsonian and the Air and Space Museum and all the monuments (and you could shop. I do remember tearing up when I saw the Declaration of Independence, probably due to all the colonial American history I had been exposed to as a child). By ninth grade we were going on band trips to Virginia Beach which were just an excuse to go screw around on the beach for a week.

But the most memorable was one that my sixth grade Gifted & Talented class did, where we went to New York, ate at the Hard Rock Cafe, one girl got her hair cut at Vidal Sassoon, and I'm sure at some point we did something that had some educational value, but I'm not sure what. Oh, I think it was the Museum of TV, Radio and Film, which is awesome, but is in Queens.