School's Out: These Kids!!!

After having a marvelous Thanksgiving break, I was truly looking forward to having an equally wonderful time on a field trip with the 10th graders upon returning to school on Monday. We began a new unit on human suffering and the power of voice (and voicelessness), so we thought it'd be appropriate to take them to the Holocaust Museum.

BAD IDEA.

The kids are from DC but most of them haven't been farther than four blocks from their homes and the school, so have never experienced many of the cultural activities to which we would like to expose them. 

Okay. 

That's fine.

You haven't been exposed (or as my older family members and Kanye like to say, "you ain't been nowhere, huh?")

But does that give you ANY reason to laugh, scream, loudly smack your gum, and even RUN in a museum that is probably the furthest from superficial and "fun" in the metro area?

I can't.

I was so embarrassed! It was the one time that I was happy to look like a student instead of a supervising adult. We were almost kicked out of the place!

And this was after we basically got kicked out of the Post Pavilion about an hour before because some kids in our group stole a crapload of gum from a convenience store.

REALLY????

It makes me wonder if all kids are like this, or do we just have a very "interesting" group. I know that we, as a people, have become progressively desensitized and it's probably largely due to all of the violence in various forms of media, but I never would have imagined that someone could even crack a smile at pictures of dead bodies heaped on top of each other, or starving and overworked children, or thousands of shoes piled up signifying only a small portion of those killed during the Holocaust.

I never imagined it could get to the point that we could look things like that in the face and take them so lightly.

It's actually quite horrifying.

I felt so bad for those people who were truly there to experience the museum and had to deal with our large group of kids acting like they had no sense whatsoever. 

Someone PLEASE tell me that this is just something that's limited to those kids, because if this is what is considered "normal" everywhere, I may just give up hope now.