Los Reprobatos

Recently I had my annual springtime revelation that I haven't spent my professional development funds (every year I make an oath that next year I'll remember, but, of course, I don't).  I started looking around for a suitable conference and came across one in Lisbon.  This made me think of the student trip I led to Spain and Portugal over Thanksgiving break in 2016, and in turn I reached out to a couple of the students to tell them that I was talking to the good folks at WLFT Hostel in Lisbon (which, by the way, is a fantastic hostel).  One of the student, Kirsten, sent along a picture of some graffiti (which was encouraged on the ceiling) at the hostel.  The students were Kirsten Potts, Jo Ames, John Amigo and Katie Lawrence. Last Saturday I was up on campus for an admitted student day here at Champlain to talk about the travel courses, and at one time we had a video running from the India/Sri Lanka trip, a running series of pictures from the Jordan trip, and an entire table full of artifacts from the Zanzibar trips.  I found myself wondering why we didn't have anything from the Spain/Portugal trip, which was only re-enforced by Kirsten's note.  I don't know why that trip has faded into relative obscurity, because it was an absolutely fantastic trip.  My student Eli Santos still swears up and down that it was the best week of his life.  The students uniformly had a great time. Part of the problem might be that we went in November and then as soon as we returned it was full scale mad planning for the India/Sri Lanka trip, which had enough of its own chaos.  That said, there may be another reason.  When we were in India one of the student, Mitch, who had also gone with us to Spain/Portugal, asked I had bothered taking kids to Spain and Portugal?  We were sitting in the midst of the general chaos of India and, by comparison, at least to Mitch, the Iberian peninsula just seemed awfully tame.  However, apparently it wasn't simply Mitch who thought it was tame.  Maybe I've convinced myself that you have to go much further afield for the trip to be truly transformative.  However, is that really true?  If the locale is so "exotic" that the students retreat into themselves then maybe it's not as transformative as some place that feels a bit more comfortable.  I certainly asked the students to do a lot more on the Spain/Portugal trip and gave each of them daily chores to lead, which I would never have done in India or Africa or Jordan, which in turn pushed them outside their comfort zone and made them interact to their new locale in a way that they might have in the other locations.  Either way, it's making me want to revisit that trip, so expect some posts as I get caught up.

Oh, and Katie, KT, really?  You would have thought that all those papers I made you write would have inspired your literary talents to come up with a better