The Field Trip Office

Welcome in. Mind the map on the desk, it has been chewed only a little.

The Field Trip Office is where Evershade leaves the castle. Every class in this school has a world outside it: the herbs are growing in real gardens, the old letters are carved on real stones, the apothecary jars are sitting in real museums, and the sky is doing its work over every town on earth. Field trips are how scholars go and look. Every place a scholar can walk to, ride to, or persuade a grown-up to drive to is field trip country: museums, cemeteries, antique shops, forests and fields, and the streets of your own town.

A field trip is not an event. It is an invitation that stays open. Every post on the Field Trip blog is one trip: a place, a mission, and a list of things worth noticing when you get there. There are no dates to keep and no lists to sign. A trip posted in October is still open in April. Take them in any order, take the same one twice, take one with your whole household. The trips wait. Places are patient. And the posts name kinds of places, not famous ones: any museum with an Egyptian room, any cemetery with old stones, any antique shop, any stretch of woods. Your town has these.

Most trips come in two levels, like the lessons do. Level One is the at-home way: the same mission done with what your home, your town, and the library can give you. Level Two is the in-person way: the trip out to the real place. Neither level is the lesser one. They are the same field work at different ranges, and a scholar's address is never a reason to miss a lesson. A few trips have no home version at all, because the place is the lesson; those say so plainly on their posts, and they are worth leaving the house for.

When you come back, you file a Field Report. That is what the comments under each trip are for. A good report is short: where you went, what you found, and one thing that surprised you. Reports are the best reading in this office, and other scholars plan their own trips by them, so write yours like you are leaving a map for the next mouse.

The rules of the road are few, and they are not negotiable.

1. Observe, do not take. Look, sketch, copy, photograph. Nothing comes home in your pockets from a museum, a cemetery, or the wild. Leave every place exactly as you found it, for the next traveler and for the place itself.

2. Respect the places. Cemeteries are the school's best lettering classrooms and somebody's family ground at the same time. Walk softly, photograph stones, never rub a fragile stone, never move or lean on anything. Museum rules (no flash, no touching) are the lesson's rules too.

3. Travel sensibly. Go with someone, or tell someone where you are going. Daylight for outdoor trips. Check opening hours and admission before you set out, and if a place asks an entrance fee, the at-home version of the trip is always free.

4. Wonder is required. Everything else is flexible.

That is the whole of the law.

Photographs & the Field Trip Gallery

Took a photograph on a field trip? Good. The Field Trip Gallery is where the school's travels collect, and every photograph there wears a frame naming the town and country where the trip was taken, so the whole school can watch the map fill in. Send yours in, and take your place on the map.

Photographs travel by the form on this page. Include:

1. Your name as you want it shown (your scholar name is fine).

2. The name of the field trip you took.

3. Where you completed it: town and country. Never an exact address. "Lawrence, United States" is perfect; your street is nobody's business.

4. The photograph itself, the best one, the one that shows what you found.

5. One or two sentences about it: what it is, and why you picked it.

6. Your house, if you have joined one and want it shown.

7. A tick in the permission box, saying the photograph is yours and the school may post it in the gallery.

House rules for photographs. The photograph must be your own work. Places and things make the best field trip photographs; if people appear in yours, they should be your own party, happy to be in it. Nothing with an exact address, a license plate, or anything else that tells the world precisely where somebody lives.

What happens next. Submissions are read and framed by hand, so allow a little time. When yours goes up, it joins the gallery with its place frame on it, and a note goes under the trip's post so your fellow travelers can find it.

Not sure where your photograph belongs? Field trip photographs come here. Everything else you make, assignments, artwork, and creations of every kind, belongs in the Student Gallery.