I just came back from an extremely boring field trip and today's post is going to be all about it. Before heading towards the bus to drive to the "JA Finance Park" I was worried because my friend still wasn't here. I was very surprised because he told me that he was going to come, however by the time the bus driver closed the doors he hadn't come. So for the whole morning bus ride, I was sitting by myself just staring out the window. I remember hearing my teacher talking to a bunch of other students near the middle of the bus about what they would be as animals. Some kids got really funny animals like Hippopotamuses and Skunk but I wanted to be a Panda since that's the most Asian "living" animal out there. I couldn't be a dragon because that is technically only on the mythological side of things, or so people think. Once we (class) got to the building my teacher put us in a single file line before entering inside.

There was a room that we spent about the whole time in because they intended to keep us there. As all the 7th graders were filing into the room the people working they've split us into different groups. I and my group of kids sat at a table with another adult and we got to know her a little bit before the man in the front of the room started speaking into his microphone. I could tell that all the folks that we were here hadn't prepared that well because the speaker had a lot of problems with his voice being too low since the microphone wasn't working. In addition, our volunteer wanted us to finish faster than the rest of the kids so that we would be ahead and get a good grade. That's right, apparently, we were going to be getting a grade for this and the people working there would send that grade to our teachers. At this point, we started learning what we would be doing for the rest of our time there. 

Each student got a tablet and we were supposed to press the app that was made by the "JA Financial Park Organization". Each person was supposed to answer a set of questions that would determine which person they got. You see, after the survey they would give you the life of another person (fake), I got a man who was 27 and had 1 child but single. My yearly gross income was $39,000 and my net monthly income was $2,250. I think that that was much higher than a few other kids that I was near but one girl in my class got $89,000 of her yearly gross income! Though she did have a crazy large number of taxes. Finally, we got to the really complicated part, the volunteers or workers in each group would give us codes to put for each tax that we needed to pay. One of them was Child Care which I thought was pretty stupid because some people didn't have "children" (for their person) so it seemed pointless. Anyway, it's not like I could do anything about it.

Now it's time for me to skip to the ending of the field trip. We had to use the money that we got monthly and fill it in for all of the taxes. It was at this point that I understood just how much people have to go through and I feel bad for parents. Once you finished filling in all the taxes you got a fake debit card and were supposed to go to every section (actual stands) and swipe your card. I got really mad because the lady or person who was in charge of my group told me to only do 4 of them, however in reality you were supposed to do all of them. So when she said I wasn't paying attention I got pretty mad. I felt like just yelling at her but knew that hse'd probably tell my teacher I was being "rude" and then I'd get a detention for no reason. So instead, I ignored her for the rest of the day, that was my field trip! Hopefully you enjoyed what I wrote!