Field Trips Part One

In a past entry I recounted the virtues of Orv Schlatter.  In order to put things in perspective, I should probably spend a little time giving an in depth account of why students loved him so much, and why my wife was a little suspicious of him, but I will save that for another time.

From the moment I began to work with him, Orv proved to me me how important first hand experience was in teaching.  In every single class period I had the pleasure to watch him in action, he inserted an experience he had somewhere in the world.  Invariably those talks would end in a field trip.  So, when we were talking about water filtration, we would go to the water filtration plant.  I would come up with a writing assignment so that there would be some accountability.  When some of our students got themselves into some trouble with the law, he scheduled a "scared straight" experience at the Pendleton prison.  (If that wasn't an eye opener to the students, it was too me).

A trip that he arranged every year, came when he was teaching about the court system.  We would go to each of the courts, observe trials, and get some time afterward to talk with the judge, the lawyers, and even the bailiff.  I remember one trial specifically.  The defendant had allegedly murdered a girl at a party.  Because Orv had arranged for us to be there in advance, we were able to have seats in the front row before the trial began.  One by one all of the major players entered the room.  First came the prosecutor and his team.  There were three of them.  Our students wanted to know who they were.  Orv, who always knew the teaching moment, told them the job of the prosecutor, how they got the job, and who this prosecutor was.

When he was nearly finished, a police officer entered with two men.  One was dressed in a three piece suit and carried a brief case.  He looked to be in his late twenties and was quite handsome.  The girls in the class swooned over him.  They didn't even notice the other man who was wearing a wrinkled leisure suit (after all it was the early 70's).  He also carried a briefcase.  Orv let them drink it all in and began to talk about defense lawyers.  He told them that there were regular criminal defense lawyers and then there were public defense lawyers.  He made sure that they knew that this lawyer was a public defender.  I heard one of the girls say to another, "He's just out of college, so he's not too much older than us!"

Before he could correct them, we learned that the police officer was the bailiff because he announced the judge.  Orv sat down to let the circumstances play out.  The judge read the case and asked for the lawyers to announce themselves.  The prosecutor stood up and stated his name.  The girls didn't care, they wanted to know the name of the cute public defender.  Unfortunately, it was the leisure suit guy that stood.  He announced his name.  The girls were confused, the cute guy must be his assistant or something.  When the judge asked for the defendant to stand, the dreamboat man stood.

The girls in our group were devastated.  And when they heard what this guy had done to the girl, they turned pail.  As he sat down, he gave a wink to a couple of the girls nearest him.  One screamed and the other just hid her eyes in her hands.  Needless to say, the whole class listened to every word that was spoken that day.  What they also witnessed that day was an older judge who had to be awakened to rule on objections.

We would always debrief our field trips on the day after, but the trial was on a Friday.  We didn't have a chance to go over it on Monday either because Orv had scheduled us for misdemeanor court.  That was quite a learning experience, and Orv knew that it would be, but he had no way of knowing how close to home the experience would be.  You see, misdemeanor court on Monday's is filled with the weekend's arrests.  It was a potpourri of charges that were paraded before the judge.  We saw theft, drugs, public intoxication, battery, you name it.

One of the last cases on the docket was a drunk and disorderly man.  He was caught wandering in the neighborhood near our school.  According to the police officer's report, this man had drunk enough on Friday night that the bar took his keys away from him.  He decided to walk home.  In his drunken state he became disoriented, unsure of where he lived.  He attempted to enter a few homes until one of the homeowners called the police.  When the police caught up to him, he was urinating in the front yard of a house.

Because we had seen so many cases that day, I didn't pay any attention to names towards the end.  I probably wouldn't have connected it even if I had.  Orv didn't either.  One of the girls sitting next to him whispered something to him and pointed over near me.  That is when Orv got up, slightly flustered, but composing himself enough to gather all of us to go.   The young man sitting next to me asked me if he could stay.  I was starting to tell him that we had to go when he interupted me, "That's my father."

We worked it out so that I could stay with the boy while Orv took everyone else back on the bus.  Orv came back to get us later.  In the meantime I learned that the boy's father was a habitual offender.  The boy had not seen his father or mother the whole weekend.  He had to take care of his younger siblings.  We took him home to find that there was no heat, no food, and obviously no parents.   We helped him and his brothers and sister to get to their aunt's place across town.

As we were driving back, Orv told me that there would be no debriefing and that he wanted to move on the the legislative branch of government.  Funny thing, even though I know that the students had questions about the trials, they never asked when we moved on.  Experience can be the best teacher.