30 January 2008

The Result of Too Much Time on my Hands

I was thinking about how some words in English have lots of meanings and uses. Some that came to mind were "bridge," "field," and "head," so here's a story using as many as I could work in there. All in all, 9.2% of the words in this story are one of the three!

A Field Trip

Hello there– I’m Miss Fields. Let me tell you about the field trip I took the school on today… what an adventure! I usually have a good head for child management, which is why I got promoted. I used to be just an office assistant for the head of the school, I’d mostly field phone calls and talk with troublemakers to try to bridge a gap. Now I’m head of the field trip programs. We do creative trips-- such as visiting the bridge of a ship and talking with an expert in the field. Today’s trip was simply to a soccer field to play some ball.

I gathered the kids at the head of the stairs to do a safety talk before we headed out. I hadn’t prepared much to say, I figured I would say whatever came to my head and then field questions. The most important thing for them to get their heads around was to stay within the field of view of the teachers. Last time they couldn’t make heads or tails of that concept, and ran all over the place. However, I assured them that if they didn’t stay in our field of vision, heads would roll. I was sure something would go wrong, but we’d cross that bridge when we came to it.

We headed over to the sports fields. One of the teachers had gone ahead to set up, and to give her a bit more of a head start I paused the kids every so often to make the journey educational. When we crossed a bridge over the stream I had them look at the structure, and by poking their heads around a fence they saw a squirrels’ nest. That sort of field observation is very useful for children. I asked them to describe the American flag we saw waving at the head of the school flagpole, and they remembered about the thirteen stripes and the fifty stars on a blue field.

On the other side of the bridge, we walked past right field of the baseball diamond and reached the soccer field. I asked the two children who would head their teams as captain to call a coin toss. “heads or tails?” John chose heads, and won the toss. “Players, take the field!” I called. Each team huddled for a moment, putting their heads together to decide positions. Play went well for only a few minutes, then it started to look like a battle field out there. John started to yell at his team, the power obviously having gone to his head. Everybody wanted to head the ball, the captains constantly biting the heads off of their teams… it was horrible. The problem came to a head when little Marcus, a head shorter than the rest of the class, got knocked over. The poor kid got a ball in the back of the head and fell flat on his face, breaking the bridge of his glasses and getting covered in dirt from head to toe in the process.

We took a break to talk about teamwork and respect, and when the game restarted it went much better. Marcus wasn’t really hurt (he’s got a tough skull under that head of bright red hair!) and everybody enjoyed the game in the end. We headed back across the bridge to the school, another successful field trip accomplished.

3 comments:

Kathleen said...

Your next challenge is to translate that into Russian, and then French.

Kathleen said...

Was Marcus at the head of the line on the return trip? And, for your French readers, did the winners exult because they were champs?

Kel said...

Haha :) Nah, but if I ever have a tête-à-tête with a French person about this story I'll mention that.