Air Academy High School offers a variety of different countries that students can travel to every year, each with its own unique culture and traditions. The countries that are currently available to travel to at AAHS in 2022 and 2023 are Australia, New Zealand, and Thailand, alongside any countries that world language teachers choose to travel to. Each of these countries has a different culture compared to the United States, and luckily for the students at AAHS, they get the opportunity to travel to these countries and experience it for themselves.

Although AAHS teaches about different countries’ cultures and traditions, traveling there directly allows for students to fully emerge themselves in a culture and learn about it. Traveling to a foreign country with natives that speak differently can help students develop speaking skills that they didn’t have prior, as well as help students, develop a sense of responsibility and maturity.

Meeting new people with completely different life experiences can help students build character and open their minds to a new way of thinking.

“I am a strong believer that traveling teaches students skills that they can’t learn from a classroom, such as reading a map or figuring out how to use public transportation and by being outside of their comfort zone they can build their social skills, so it’s a big learning experience for them,” teacher Renee Motter said.

Many of the young students at AAHS haven’t had the experience of traveling outside of the United States. Countries all around the world offer a variety of goods and services that are unique and only offered in certain countries.

By traveling, many students get to try new foods and do new things that they never got to do before, and they also get to see parts of the world that they might never get the opportunity to see.

“When I visited France a couple of summers ago was when I probably had some of the best food I’ve ever had,” sophomore Owen Bailey said.

Traveling also allows for students to learn more about the history of other cultures and how they came to be, the internet and teachers can only explain so much, but by experiencing it firsthand is a great on-site learning process for students. Visiting new places with different architecture, monuments, fashion and more can also help students become more creative and thoughtful of how the rest of the world looks.

Unfortunately during the school year of 2020 and 2021, which was the pandemic year, AAHS wasn’t able to give the opportunity for students to travel. However, now that AAHS has started moving toward how things used to be, traveling out of the country is once again on the list of many things that AAHS offers.

“We had trips planned in 2020 which was obviously canceled, we then moved the trips to 2021 which was also canceled, so now we’re starting to move back towards the way things used to be, but there are still a lot of requirements in order to make it work,” Motter said.

For some people, traveling is an opportunity that can be a huge eye-opener, luckily for the students at AAHS they get that opportunity to travel the world and see what it has to offer.