Class Trips

Senior Trip
Hermit Island, Maine

Academe seniors travel to Hermit Island, Maine, to join seniors from other North American Waldorf high schools for a memorable week of art, poetry, and marine biology. Our days on the island start as early as 5:30 a.m., depending on the tides, at the tide pools about a mile from our campsite. After two hours spent locating and documenting knotted wrack, sea stars, crabs, moon snails, periwinkles, rockweed, barnacles, and various other forms of coastal flora and fauna, we hike back to camp for breakfast—after which we set off for the kelp shed where we examine marine life up-close.

After lunch, we indulge in a bit of poetry or painting (water-colors, of course!), try our hand at microscope drawings, and explore beach/dune ecology. On the mud flats at low tide, students are sent off to find a clam and a worm, and to have a bite of a sea pickle plant. Then, at last, the “mud frolicking” can begin! Students play in the mud until they are thoroughly daubed and then take a refreshing swim in the ocean to clean off. The first night’s activities include campfire discussions about how students see the world, how it can be changed, how we are going to get there, and who is going to do it. Later in the week, we are treated to a poetry reading with Maine’s poet laureate. On our last night on the island, we enjoy a rousing contra dance—a celebration of our week together.

Junior Trip
Puerto Rico

Two years after Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 storm, devastated Puerto Rico, Academe’s junior class made its first trip to the island where our students spent a week traveling to different regions performing service projects. The trip brings together language emersion, meaningful service to others, and experiential learning.

Spending time with Puerto Ricans gives our juniors a valuable new perspective. They discover the effects of “mainland” policies on colonized peoples. They see the U.S. in a more nuanced light and experience the rich history and diverse culture of the Caribbean. Students often describe the class trip to Puerto Rico as “eye-opening, surprising, and beautiful.”

Sophomore Trip
Suwannee River

In their mathematics track class, tenth-graders explore Euclidean geometry and the rudiments of trigonometry. The concurrent Mechanics main lesson block provides substantial theoretical practice with trigonometric relationships; a week of surveying in the Appalachian mountains gives students real-world experience of these mathematical principles. When they are not hiking, zip-lining, rafting, or reflecting on the majesty of their surroundings, students learn to use the basic tools of surveying—transit, compass, tape measure, leveling rod—to determine elevations of objects on various peaks surrounding the base camp and to calculate distances that are not amenable to direct measurement (such as the width of the Nantahala River). The laws of sines and cosines are given practical application in the woods and wilds of North Georgia.

Freshman Trip
Ossabaw Island

The 9th grade class trip to Ossabaw Island provides an opportunity for us to combine lessons from our history block, Atlantic Cultures and Empires, with hands-on experience investigating the relics of the past. This year’s trip was no exception. Students camped on the south end of the island under a stand of spreading live oaks. There we explored the flora and fauna of this barrier island first inhabited by coastal tribes more than 5000 years ago. Much later Spanish explorers used the island as a food cache—depositing hogs that remain to this day—colonial plantations planted indigo, and 20th century industry harvested pine trees. All these activities leave traces, and over the course of a week, students examine archaeological evidence, investigate the architecture of tabby cabins, and learn about how the island sustained these populations. When we return to Academe, we are better able to visualize the moment when European people and the people of this continent first encountered one another.