Weren’t You Worried About Your Kids Education?

Yeah, sort of. Our kids attend public school – this is the first day of class the year before we left on our trip. We knew that we couldn’t expect too much of ourselves on the road and decided that the only subject which we would formally teach our children was math. We hoped everything else would come naturally. We met with the school principal to inform him of our plans and he responded, “Don’t worry about it. Your kids will be fine!” At this point we wanted to scream at him, “You mean all of those hours of homework you send home don’t mean a thing?” We held our tongues.

What about books?

We wanted the kids to read lots of books over the year and so September became Amazon.com’s favorite customer. In this picture you can see twelve piles of books; each pile has a “Katrina” stack and a “Jordan” stack. We bought books for the kids that covered roughly the areas we were planning to visit. For example, before we went to China we had Katrina read books such as Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution, by Ji-li Jiang, or before we went to Southeast Asia we had Jordan read the book The Land I Lost: Adventures of a Boy in Vietnam, by by Quang Nhuong Huynh. September’s mother FedEx-ed a package of books to us once a month, wherever we happened to be.

Working on math in the dining room of a cargo ship

We learned to do schoolwork wherever we happened to be. In this picture we are in the dining room of a cargo ship, on our way to the southern tip of South America. Katrina and Jordan are working on math, and John is writing in his journal.

Oxford, England

Our emphasis on books backfired. Katrina and Jordan both love to read, and they would get so absorbed in their books that they would forget to notice their surroundings. We are floating in a punt on a river through beautiful Oxford, but the kids hardly know it.

St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City, Italy

St Peter’s Basilica is one of the most beautiful cathedrals in the world, but Katrina and Jordan aren’t paying attention. We had just received a shipment of books that morning – I had a co-worker who had a friend in Rome who received our FedEx package for us and met us on a street corner to give us the books. You can see that Katrina and Jordan are at the beginning of their new books, and they’re not about to look up and take note that they are actually in Italy.

Salisbury, England

In addition to math and reading, the third and final part of our home-school program was to have the children write in journals. We are camping in Salisbury, England, and you can see that the kids have their pajamas on. It’s actually about 9:00 at night, but it stays light very late in England in the month of June. Jordan wrote his journal on an AlphaSmart keyboard, and Katrina had an old Palm Pilot with a detachable keyboard. John is adjusting the brakes on Purple Pedal Power, one of our tandems.

American Cemetery, Normandy, France

One of the goals of having the kids read so many books is so that they would be interested in the places we were planning to go. Before we went to the northern coast of France, we read books about World War II and the Normandy Invasion. For example, Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories: World War II helped us learn about D-Day, and Claire Bishop’s Twenty and Ten, the story of twenty schoolchildren in northern France who hid ten Jewish children from the occupying Nazis, illustrated why the D-Day invasion was necessary in the first place.