Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

Lily's hair got shorter and shorter during the year; she started by donating her pony tail in Minnesota! In Melbourne in January her hair got a lot shorter. Also, check out those freckles! The hair on my head has been getting scarcer for at least 20 years. Every haircut I've gotten in the last fifteen has been shorter than the one before it. For the last ten years I've been giving myself buzz cuts in the mirror, trusting Elise to tell me when I've missed a spot. Every few years the guard on the clippers has gotten smaller. During this time, I've missed barbershops and their casual banter. Elise once gave me a gift certificate to a place where I got a buzz, a beer, plus a hand and face massage but no chatter. I went to a place in our neighborhood and paid $30 for a buzz and a can of hipster beer but I was definitely too old and square to earn a conversation. Besides, even if I took a trim every two weeks (I prefer weekly), that would be an expensive habit....

It was hard to decide that we wouldn't visit Selma. Each person we met in Montgomery gave us the same advice: go to Selma, walk across the bridge. But some of these experiences don't seem appropriate for the children, no matter how important they are. It has been in the high nineties consistently during our time here and we couldn't see how the kids would make it over the bridge and still have the capacity to comprehend what had happened and what it meant. (Apologies,:if you don't know this history, please look up the Pettus Bridge.) This is the constant debate with this in-person educational experience: confronting the history, in person and on site is more meaningful than reading about it in textbooks. This visit has caused me to consider how to encourage other families (or classes, or schools) to make this journey. But these experiences, these confrontations and emotional or intellectual conflicts, are difficult. I believe we (and by we I mean white Americans eve...

Sorry, folks, nothing clever or witty in this one. We are in Montgomery, Alabama. When we planned this itinerary with a primary focus on visiting national parks, we decided we would visit key sites in the civil rights movement. Then, in April 2018, we learned about the opening of the Legacy Museum by the Equal Justice Initiative and it became clear that Montgomery would be an immutable destination. Now we are here. To prepare, I bought three books that have been incredibly valuable. 1. The Civil Rights Movement for Kids by Mary C. Truck . The book provides descriptions of key characters, settings and moments in a way that is neither cartoonish or encyclopedic. We have found that we can read this to the kids, unabridged, and hold their attention. The book includes activities to help the kids engage with the material in a practical way. It also supports our strategy, which is helping the kids relate to specific individuals, from MLK and Rosa Parks to Emmitt Till, Barbara Johns and...

Let it be not forgotten, dear reader, that we're also trying to educate our kids in a conventional sense. Please picture this: on a typical day, we try to conduct achieve two hours of parallel productivity for four students in the same small space where we have just prepared, consumed and cleaned up breakfast. Most of our activity is online so we are at the mercy of the local wifi, our mobile hotspot or our cell phone hotspots (the latter two being dependent on cell service). It reminds me of when Montana didn't, in a strict sense, have a speed limit. Signs announced "reasonable and prudent" and one local explained that the enforceable limit depended on three conditions: the condition of the road, the condition of the weather and the condition of the officer's marriage. In the name of candor, let's talk about this morning. We were in an RV park with good wifi. When we checked in (yesterday) I noticed that they had a community room next too the office that ...