During the week we returned from April break, our 48 eighth graders and six adult chaperones set off for a whirlwind class trip to Southwest to visit our National Parks. The students were awed by amazing vistas, climbed to new heights, floated down the Colorado River, and discovered something new about themselves and their classmates. The intrepid chaperone team of Emily Phan, Conor Garrison, Trinity Johns, Khang Phan, Patrick Murray, and William Hart led the students on a trip filled with adventure, joy, challenges, learning, and growth.
The chaperones penned the following letter to the eighth grade students, which showcases the reasons why taking this trip and taking the time together is meaningful and significant.
Dear Class of 2025,
We cannot thank you enough for making this trip such a joyful experience. We all truly loved getting to see all of you take moments of awe to appreciate the world in which we get to live. We loved the way you embraced adventure and new experiences. We loved seeing how you bonded more closely with each other. We loved hearing your singing and excitement and presence.
These qualities–your willingness to try new things, your ability to find gratitude, and your ability to connect with others meaningfully and with care–are the qualities that will make high school (and life beyond it) an incredibly rewarding experience. We hope you hold on to your sense of wonder, care, and joy. The world needs more of each of these, and we are grateful to know that there are at least 48 of you who have them in spades.
For the rest of your life, this group will always have been the people with whom you spent middle school. You will be old like your chaperones, and, looking back with some new friends or family, you’ll say “Well, in eighth grade, we …”. That’s no small thing. We hope you appreciate that you got to spend middle school with so many high-quality humans, and we hope you all find ways to stay in touch, or at least to remember the great friends you made along the way.
We hope, too, that seeing this part of the world gave you some perspective. We met really genuinely good, kind people who care deeply about the world, even though they live in places that are politically different from us in Massachusetts and live lives very differently than the lives we lead (or may lead in the years ahead). We learned from our guide Marie, who loves people so much that she spends almost all of her time meeting new people (and yet still has wonderful close friends). The lesson here is to keep your curiosity and wonder as you move through the world.
This trip was also meant to remind you of how precious and vast our world is. Although so much of it is endangered, please remember that these places have been endangered by people before, and yet, through collective action and through a refusal to give up, activists have made changes. We are lucky to live in a world where we still get to see so much natural beauty and human history–let us do everything we can to preserve that for your kids, too.
So anyway, thank you, from the bottom of our hearts, for being the people you are. We are incredibly grateful to have gotten this experience, and even more so that we got to have it with all of you. Thank you for making your chaperones smile throughout most of this trip. Your laughter, smiles, and stories (and your willingness to not complain about more turkey sandwiches) made this trip such a success far more than any planning we did.
