Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

Since most of our peers in the US are on winter vacation and marking the halfway point in the school year, let’s take a moment to make a close examination of our homeschooling effort to date. Part One: Fall Semester Timeline: In May, just a few weeks before we were set to leave, we had exactly zero idea how we were going to homeschool. We figured we had two months, July and August, in Minnesota to figure it out. Enter the Dustin of Destiny, husband of Lily’s softball coach and teacher at Summit Learning Charter, a mostly-online charter school based outside Portland. Truly, this was a miracle! Our enrollment with Summit gave us access to innumerable resources including living, breathing teachers and other education professionals. It also meant that because Summit receives our tax dollars that we receive a credit for buying curriculum materials through two catalogs. Lily, being a sixth grader, would have online classes that she didn’t have to do in real time, which was essential giv...

There's a lot of fatigue going around. This day is a Monday. We wake up in a KOA surrounded by farm fields about 20 miles west of Memphis, in Marion, Arkansas. One of our travel skills is to look at a campground with Google Earth before we book it. We look to see how closely the campground sites are packed together. We look for evidence of a good (or bad) playground. We check out the pool. This one doesn't look promising. We execute breakfast. I can't think of a more appropriate verb. The KOA has a renowned restaurant. We got pulled pork sandwiches from them the night before and they were great. This morning the line is long and the food looks mediocre. School. This is a big day for Lily because we have withdrawn her from her online charter school and now we're going with a more traditional homeschooling approach. We got her new math curriculum from an Amazon Locker in Birmingham on Saturday and today we're diving in. It goes well and we feel encouraged. Honestl...

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...