Why Do So Many 8th Graders Take a Field Trip to Washington D.C.?

How the 8th grade D.C. field trip became a national tradition—and why missing it still stings.

Photo by Andy He on Unsplash

I remember the Washington, D.C. field trip my class took in 2007: a five-day excursion (!), out of state (!!), where all students were allowed to stay in a hotel room (!!!) without adult supervision (!!!!). For a bunch of pubescent teenagers with underdeveloped frontal cortices, this was exactly what I thought our founding fathers had in mind.

Naturally, I missed the most formative experience of middle school—which, at the time, felt like the most formative experience I’d ever have.

Not letting me go was consistent with the precedent my mom had set for my brother in the spring of 2002, a moral dilemma during a time of real national vulnerability. A Pew Research poll from that time found that two-thirds of Americans were affected a “great deal” from the attacks, and half felt it had a major change on life in America.

In short, if he couldn’t go, I couldn’t go (which felt fair, until a few years later when my sister went). The letdown started out depressingly enough: while hundreds of students gathered in the gym for a pre-trip assembly, we non-attendees were herded into a small classroom for what felt like exile orientation.

But it quickly became clear they had no real plan for us.

So, I stayed home, bought The Godfather video game—I was deep in my organized crime era at the time—and started running my own crime family while my friends stayed up late and visited the Washington Monument.

Whenever I want to make my mom feel guilty—something I do sparingly, but with precision—I’ll bring up this trip (sorry, Mom). And every time I told the story to others, people responded with their own: stories of charter buses, chaperones, and late-night hallway shenanigans. After hearing it enough times, I started to realize this wasn’t just some one-off rite of passage I missed. This was a full-blown American tradition.

Last year in Thrillist, I wrote about how the trip to Washington D.C. has become an American tradition for three generations of students all across the country.

Every year, more than one million eighth graders—about one in every three—can be seen running up and down the National Mall in matching school-colored tees, pacing awkwardly in the Smithsonian, taking lunch at the L’Enfant Plaza and Pentagon City food courts, and racking up soda fountain tabs at the Hard Rock Cafe

This was such a fun story to pull the threads on: the founder, a charismatic middle school teacher-turned-tour-operator-turned-fitness-buff; the value of museums in the educational system; the security outfits hired to make sure eighth graders didn’t cause a fuss; and, my favorite, how the Hard Rock Café has become a culinary staple of the trip.

Meanwhile, the Hard Rock Cafe serves as a beacon of sustenance that helps to fuel all that sight-seeing. The Hard Rock not only plans for these travelers—a student group-focused menu, including a soda, entree, and chocolate chip cookies for dessert, ensures that students are “in and out in about an hour,” says Sara Lester, a regional sales and marketing manager at Hard Rock Cafe—but it relies on them, too. Case in point: Through March and April of this year, they’ve welcomed a total of 25,000 eighth graders, putting them on pace to reach 50,000 students by the end of the field trip season.

You can read the full story by following the link below.

Alla prossima,

🤖