Going Global

Winterim is just around the corner for Upper School students and faculty. Once again, Brimmer is going global (and local, because this is part of the globe). During the annual exit interviews with the senior class, students tell us that Winterim is their favorite program and that they do not think we should ever move away from it. They tell us this every year without fail. To some extent, this is understandable as Winterim provides our students with the opportunity to take a week of school days (in which they would otherwise be in classes) to travel abroad with classmates and friends to explore other parts of the world.

In the past 15 years, and in some instances still in the present, these parts of the world have included (in alphabetical order): Austria; Belize; Boston, Massachusetts; Cambodia; China; Cuba; Dominican Republic; Galapagos Islands, Ecuador; England; France; Germany; Greece; Iceland; India; Ireland; Italy; Japan; New Orleans, Louisiana; New York City; Puerto Rico; Scotland; Senegal; South Africa; South Korea; Switzerland; Vietnam; and Washington, DC. This year we added a trip to the Balkans to our list with students starting their trip in Venice and traveling down the Dalmatian coast including brief sojourns in Slovenia and Bosnia in addition to the preponderance of time in Croatia. We also added a trip to the American Southwest. We have trips heading to Boston, China, Dominican Republic, the Grand Canyon, France and Italy, India, and London this year with many new educational experiences planned for our students.

Our students have spent time in numerous world capitals and other major cities–Athens, Barcelona, Beijing, Dakar, Dublin, Edinburgh, Havana, Ho Chi Minh City, London, Madrid, New York, Paris, Phnom Phen, Reykjavik, Rome, Seoul, Tokyo, Vatican City, and Washington, DC—and they spent money as well, having to cope with exchanging their dollars for numerous foreign currencies–dong, euros, krona, renminbi, riel, pesos, pounds sterling, Swiss francs, West African francs, won, and yen. Sometimes they learned that the US dollar is the preferred choice of currency in another country such as Cambodia and Ecuador, or to their astonishment they carried with them hundreds of thousands of units of a currency that represented $20.

Our students have learned how to pack and how not to pack for these trips; how to dress for air travel and how dress for educational touring with their school, including how to dress or not to dress in Asia, Africa, or Europe, and how to dress when visiting religious or important cultural sites in other countries; how to conduct themselves as they move through airport security, touring venue security, and customs; how to conduct themselves in hotels and restaurants and with vendors around the world.

Most importantly, our students learn about history, art, culture, language, literature, customs, heritage, dress, cuisine, governance, industry, environment, politics, media and much more. Our students visited historical places in the world–Angkor Wat, Auschwitz, the Colosseum, the Great Wall, the Killing Fields, Notre Dame Cathedral, and St. Peter’s Basilica, to name a few of the many significant destinations for their various trips. Ultimately, their trips are about learning; they learn about nature and humanity’s relation to the natural world; they learn about creativity, and at times, destruction; they learn about beliefs and perspectives; they learn about humanity, and sometimes inhumanity; they learn about themselves, and they learn about others; they learn about themselves in relation to others. They learn these things at Brimmer directly and experientially by going global during each Winterim program. There’s some more good learning coming their way in two months time, and education of a lifetime augmented by a trip of a lifetime.

Let’s go!