Washington D.C. Trip

April 17th - 24th, 2009

Posted By Jennifer Derosby, Head of Middle House

In the end, there were 22 kids and 4 adults. The day we left brought a foot of snow to Denver but we were able to sneak out just before the storm.  We had many students who had never flown before, but they handled it well.  We were also traveling with Naomi, a wheelchair bound student who only has movement of her head.  By the end of the week, we were lifting Naomi up stairs and making room for her on the Metro platforms due to the troubling conditions for those with disabilities when using public transit.  While the Metro is really easy to navigate, the elevator at the stop nearest our house was out and had been for 9 months!  This caused us to have to walk an additional 9 blocks each day to get to a Metro stop with a working elevator.  When the trains were particularly busy and full of tourists, it was hard to get Naomi on and off because people wouldn't push back or get out of the way.  By the third day of this, the kids devised a plan to lead and "politely" ask people to get out of the way or push back.  Naomi would giggle wildly when they would do this.  Needless to say, this was an incredible learning experience for the kids and really built their empathy.  
 
Our first night in DC we settled into our houses which were great.  We stayed in the Howard university neighborhood which has great history and our houses were these tall, skinny town houses that were really quite fancy.  Here is a link to a picture of one of the houses our group stayed in:  http://www.vrbo.com/231133  For dinner on our first night, we went to the historic Ben's Chili Bowl (www.benschilibowl.com) which I'm convinced may have been the highlight of the trip for many of the kids.  If you go to the Ben's website, you can see why and you can also see pictures of the neighborhood we stayed in because Ben's was just a few blocks from our houses.  We got the sweet group deal that included a 70 year old named Marshall who had worked at Ben's for over 30 years telling the kids all kinds of great stories about the neighborhood, race history, Obama's visit, and how Bill Cosby had just stopped by earlier that same day we were there.  The kids filled their bellies with half smokes and chili cheese fries-they thought DC was awesome.

The second day was grocery day and you can imagine 26 folks at the neighborhood grocery story trying to figure things out.  The kids were broken into groups, each responsible for a dinner with a budget of $50.00 to feed 25 and the adults handled breakfast and lunch.  It took us two hours!  We were heading to the mall later to have a picnic and tour some monuments at night (I highly recommend this) so we decided on rotisserie chickens for this because they came with free sides of potato salad.  What we didn't really think through, however, was transporting 8 rotisserie chickens by train to the mall...needless to say, we smelled awesome.  We picnicked right between the Lincoln Memorial and the WWII Memorial at sunset and then the kids played this incredible game of tag on the mall-it was fantastic.  We saw FDR's memorial and the WWII memorial, both with beautiful water features and all lit up at night.  It was great.

And this is how it went, day after day.  Planned and organic moments that were great.  We went to the zoo and then walked all the way to Dupont Circle through all of these beautiful  neighborhoods in DC stopping for jumbo slices of pizza.  We easily walked for four hours that day.  We had great meals together that the kids cooked-all of the adults were waited on. 
 
Monday and Tuesday we spent the mornings at the Holocaust Museum.  Both days were rainy, so the museum was packed.  There are lots of questions about why this  museum exists on the mall of our nation's capital and most days I support its location, however, when it's a rainy day in April and the museum is just full of school groups and tourists for whom this is just another stop on their march of monuments and museums; it becomes difficult to understand.  Our group was almost more horrified by the behavior of some of the folks in the museum than the overall impact of what they were seeing.  Later that night when we processed our first day at the museum, lots of kids needed to talk about behaviors they'd witnessed (cell phones out, a kid rolling through the exhibit on his wheelies including an extended roll and spin through the train car that deported people...).  The second day at the Museum, the lines were even longer and I thought, "Oh boy, how am I going to get these guys through to where we'd left off the day before?"  All of a sudden, the woman who runs the teacher fellowship program I participated in last summer appeared and she took our group out of the line, let us in the back door and had a docent escort us up the back elevator to the floor where we'd left off.  For almost a full half hour, we were in the exhibit all by ourselves!  This is unheard of.  We were also in the hardest part of the exhibit-the camps section, and without all of the crowds to distract them, the kids really felt the intensity of the space.  We got to move slowly and read things without someone behind us annoyed that we weren't moving faster and the kids saw and experienced things that I never had in all my visits there.  They were amazing. 
 
We had coffee with Alexandra Zapruder who edited the book of diaries that we based our play on and she was lovely and engaging.  The kids felt like rock stars.  We had a behind the scenes tour at the Smithsonian Museum of Nature and Science which included (exactly as you would expect) winding up the back catacombs into the office of an eccentric archeologist who curates the museum's "Written in the Bones" exhibit.  He had a freshly exhumed set of bones lying on the table in the middle of his office and the kids were jazzed.  He held up the skull and let the kids get a close look.  The office was full of skeletons and femurs and the walls covered with newspaper clippings from the Enquirer ("Bones of 200 lb baby found in Egypt!")  and a poster that said, "Silence is golden, duct tape is silver".  It was great.
 

We went to a Nationals baseball game against the Braves which actually turned out to be a pretty good game and the Nationals even won.  We toured George Washington University and by toured I mean we hung out in the quad eating lunch and not doing anything just like college students.  We played a game of ultimate frisbee with some students from GW and our students thought they were such big cheeses.  We ate pizza dinner in Georgetown on the Potomac with a view of the Kennedy Center and the Watergate.  Even the unplanned things were great, like a spontaneous card game or dinner conversations or the kids journaling whenever they had free time.  By the end of the week, I know that some of them were ready to go home, but I know that they had a tremendous time. 
 
We are tremendously lucky to work at and attend a school that supports this learning.  I think this is a trip the kids will remember.  I know I will.