“You’re up for anything!” I’ve heard this from many people, many times. It’s a compliment, but it’s also a nice way to say that I’m the person who asks when and where to show up and what I should wear. I’m the person who follows along. I’m the person who agrees to the plans after they’re made.

I am NOT a planner.

When a teacher at the high school I’m serving asked for help introducing her students to nearby community colleges, I was excited to show the kids what a college education can mean. It doesn’t have to be four years long, and it doesn’t have to be an abstract degree only distantly related to the world of work. It doesn’t have to be hours and hours from home, in a big city, or prohibitively expensive, and most of all, it doesn’t have to be something that other people do. I was excited to show my students that college might be right for them, too.

That excitement was juuuust enough to get me through the process of planning the first field trip. There are four on the calendar, one trip per week for one whole month. I decided the first trip would take us to Salish Kootenai College, the place where I serve. I needed the home field advantage to help me get started. I emailed dozens of strangers and waited weeks for those busy college professors and program directors to reply. I had to make a spreadsheet of who’s who, what they teach, what I told them, and what they told me, just so that I wouldn’t forget. I had to estimate what time we would arrive at each department, how long we would spend there, and when we would move on to the next one. For someone who is ten minutes late to every event on my very best days, this was… difficult. I had to remember all the tiny little details, like the fact that students need to eat lunch and require transportation. And I had to fill out paperwork. So. Much. Paperwork. There’s a form to certify that the trip fulfills the goals of our grant, a form students have to sign stating they were fed, and another they have to sign stating they were successfully transported. I have to sign a form for the Transportation department so that I’m allowed to transport students, and once I transport students, I have to sign a different Transportation form stating we transported students. There are forms for each student, too, forms for the school stating the students were on a trip, not absent, and forms for the grant tallying this trip among the college and career exploration activities students are encouraged to complete each quarter.

The night before the field trip, I had nightmares about all the mistakes I might make. I was surprised when my alarm went off. I dreamt several times throughout the night that my phone malfunctioned, and I slept until noon. My colleague Lindsey and I picked up vans from SKC at 8:40 (we were supposed to be there at 8:30. Ten minutes late, as usual). We headed to the high school, filled the vans with students, and then made our way back to the college. I forgot where we were headed first, checked my handy spreadsheet on Google Drive’s mobile app, remembered, and then escorted my little group of college explorers into the Life Sciences computer lab.

Rob from Forestry passed out compasses and told us to pretend (we were inside because it was 30*F) that we were out in the woods. He had us find North, then an azimuth for a ponderosa pine outside the window. Cody from GIS showed us his drones that can see light beyond the visible spectrum. He told us how a certification in Geographic Information Systems makes a person irresistible in the job market, and then he passed out iPads so that we could experience this cutting-edge technology for ourselves. The students performed advanced scientific data collections, like writing their initials on the roofs of their houses and drawing a picture of a shark in Flathead Lake.

With digital mapping filed away as a failsafe fallback career, we went to the Student Union to eat lunch. Unlike in my dreams the night before, when all my students went hungry and refused to go to college because of my oversight, my colleague brought in pizza just as we arrived. Lunch also gave me time to send some essential communications; I had to ask all my friends what they were up to and let them know I was getting paid to shoot azimuths and draw pictures of sharks.

Next, we left the main campus and crossed the highway to visit a section of SKC I had never seen before. The students weren’t sure what to think when we walked in the unassuming building and crowded into the little gray lobby, but then Dennis from Highway Construction introduced himself.

“And when you’re ready,” he said, “I’ll take you on back to the simulator room.”

That got their attention.

For the next hour, we sat in chairs in front of giant screens. The chairs had switches and joysticks on the arms and brake and gas pedals on the floor. We dug dirt with the digital backhoe, moved piles of rocks with the digital front loader, drove the digital dump truck through an obstacle course, and only occasionally crashed into a digital tree. The toughest part of the day was dragging the kids away from their construction projects. They didn’t want to leave once they mastered those machines.

Finally, we met Jennifer and Danica from Dental Assisting. The highlight of their preview is always pouring plaster casts of teeth. While the plaster set in the rubber molds, the students went to the sterilization room to learn about Personal Protective Equipment. The first few questions were easy. Why do dental assistants need PPE? They spend all day around open mouths, of course. What kind of PPE do dental assistants wear? Glasses, masks, and gloves. Dispensers of all three were mounted on the wall.

The last question was a bit harder. How do dental assistants remove soiled gloves without contaminating their hands? Jennifer and Danica from Dental Assisting didn’t want to hear the answer to this question. They wanted to see it. They put gloves on all the students’ hands and sprayed them down with shaving cream. “Now, take off the gloves,” they said.

It was 2:30pm, and I felt like I was watching the afternoon slump settle over the students in real time. They had spent a full day trying exciting new things, which necessarily means they spent a full day being terrible at things. I have a lot of empathy for that kind of exhaustion. Since moving to Montana, I’ve had the opportunity to try a lot of new things, from fishing and horseback riding to planning field trips. Some days, I feel like I’m terrible at everything. I saw my students standing there, staring at their shaving-cream-covered hands, and I recognized the looks on their faces. I had the same one on mine when I sat down to plan this very field trip. Where does a person even begin?

One by one, the students started to try. Some of them had obviously spent time in the science lab and peeled off both gloves so that the shaving cream was safely contained inside. Most of them didn’t quite manage this. They pinched and stretched and tugged at the gloves, tried one finger at a time or all at once, and ended up with specks of shaving cream all over their fingers and forearms and wrists and palms.

My field trip had some specks of shaving cream, too. I forgot all the plans I had made the moment I arrived on campus and had to check my notes all day long. We got lost on the way to Dental Assisting, and we definitely needed more time to drive those simulators. But I think I got the gloves off, in the end. We learned that college can mean so much besides a four-year academic degree. We found new things we like, and we found some things we don’t like. We got a little practice in that essential skill of deciding a project is impossible, then getting started anyway. I’m proud of what I learned in the planning process, and I’m proud of what my students learned by trying their best and being willing to fail.

And with that, it’s time for me to get to work on next week’s field trip.