Travel Diaries: Spain and Morocco Through The Eyes of a Spanish Teacher
When I wrote this, I had recently returned to the US and was in the comfort of my own home recuperating from a ten-day trip that began in Barcelona and ended in Morocco. Let me start by saying that I had a fabulous time with my five students, however, this was my first trip abroad with students via an educational tour company and I’m afraid that it may be my last. Here’s why:
Travel Group Way Too Large
When I initially planned this trip, I capped the number at twelve participants. I know that there are teachers who prefer to take lots of kids on these types of trips, but I am not one of them. This is probably due to the fact that for nearly a decade I traveled for ten days out of each school year with seventh-graders…sixty of them…and perhaps the memories of kids getting sick, physically hurt or suffering typical kid drama may have persuaded me to focus on a much smaller group of older, more mature students.
In fact, for this trip across the pond, three of my students were recent high school grads and the remaining two were a summer vacation away from becoming high school seniors. But keep in mind that no matter the age of your students, the responsibility to both students and their parents is too immense to take lightly. Being my first travel abroad experience with students, I really wanted to focus on setting us all up for success.
However, because we were such a small group, we would have to join several other groups from around the US in order to fill a tour bus. In our case, our small group of six people, including myself, became part of a larger group of forty-two! Yep! You read that correctly, FORTY-TWO… kids and adults…together…for ten days… traversing Spain from North to the South!
Had I known from the inception of this trip that our group would be so large, I probably would have canceled it. But for some reason when my point person at Explorica informed me that we would need to fill a tour bus, I must have been delusional to assume that the bus would hold only twenty to twenty-five people. My mistake for assuming and not following up with more specific questions.
During our ten days together, I met some terrific kids and teachers, but with a group…
