Unsupervised youth
Mood:  incredulous
Can you imagine taking 13 and 14 year olds to Seattle and letting them go on their own tours of the city? Each group of about 40 kids has a GPS. The teachers are in an Internet cafe somewhere in the city monitoring each group's progress online. That's what happened with our 2nd graders last week. Two hundred students all clambered onto buses on Friday morning and headed for Kyoto. All the 2nd grade teachers accompanied them on the bus. The week before, the kids researched what they wanted to see in Kyoto and mapped out their own personally designed tour. Then each group leader got a GPS cell phone and off they went. The teachers received a printout map of their trip from the GPS company. The biggest issue is that some of the students made plans to eat in a restaurant instead of eating their packed bento box lunches. They didn't lose a single kid and no one got hurt. No parents were upset and no one got sued. Amazing.