Today we took a field trip to one of the missions. The best part, by far, was watching my students play, play, play at the awesome playground near the mission. They swung from super-high rings, sped down poles, jumped in unison off a wooden ship, played some sort of shark tag game they made up, and got really sweaty and glowing from the fun of it all.
Our tour guide at the mission, though, was really not what they needed. He talked to us for an hour-and-a-half about obscure bits of Catholic trivia and equally obscure bits of local nineteenth century gossip. He made no mention of any negative aspects of the missions at all. He spoke as if he were addressing a group of well-educated adults, using words like "fabricated" and "bequest" in every sentence. And instead of letting my students wander around some parts of the mission and the attached museum and cemetery, discovering things for themselves, he wanted us to move all together in lockstep so he could tell us yet another story about yet another saint. But, umm, hello ... nine-year olds like thinking of their own questions and making their own observations and inferring things for themselves, not being lectured to for 90 minutes.
Oh well. At least they got to actually see a mission. That's the important part.
And plus, they got to hear that the history of our state is so tied up with the history of Mexico, where almost all their families are from. One student, after hearing his name mentioned a lot in stories about the mission, turned to me and said, "Teacher, there are a lot of ________(his name, in plural) here. I must be rich."
I wish someone would start a consulting business helping all the museums and historical sites revamp their educational programs to be developmentally appropriate for kids, plus train their docents in how to talk with English Learners. I know docents are volunteers, but I also know that they want their messages to get across to the students with whom they're working, so I bet they would be receptive to at least some high-quality training. (I'm sure someone is probably already doing this ... but I'm still almost always disappointed by the ways docents try to get their messages across to my students.)
I think it might be really fun to be a docent somewhere when I retire.
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I took my tenth graders to the Mission Dolores last fall. When we got there, we were told that no tour had been arranged. At first I was mad. But then I got my hands on the docent's materials to see what I should tell them and I was relieved that we escaped. Instead of having your experience, we went as a a group into the church graveyard and I sent them out to look at gravestones and see what they could learn about the people buried there. The Catholic students told the others the story of the Virgen de Guadalupe in front of her painting. We talked about why there was an old, low mission and a newer Gothic church, and who build which, and what they were meant to signify. I read them the section of the docent's handbook that said the priests came to educate the "savages" and we talked about why that word was used. I've come to believe that teachers can almost always do better, more developmentally appropriate work than docents, except when the docents really are thoroughly trained - and that's really really rare.
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