20th anniversary of our round-the-world adventure

Twenty years ago, we bought round-the-world plane tickets, took our three kids out of school and set off on a school-year-long adventure. We left in August 2002, returned to Canada at the end of April 2003, and got back into our house (which we’d rented out) by mid-June. We were out of Canada for eight months, out of our house for 10 months and, possibly, out of our minds for a year! I wrote a story, published in the Ottawa Citizen, about the challenges of homeschooling our kids while travelling, which nicely summed up our adventure. To celebrate this 20^th anniversary, here is the story.

Homeschooling on the Road

By Kathryn Young

The absurdity of it all struck me as I was pretending to be a blackboard in Australia.

We were driving down the golden back roads Down Under – me in the left-hand passenger seat holding a sheet of paper supported on a notebook. As husband/math teacher/driver Bill intoned “2X plus 3Y equals 12” I wrote the equation down, holding the makeshift blackboard so 13-year-old Tom, in the back seat with his two sisters, could see.

I had the sudden urge to laugh at the picture of us. It was Jan. 31 and our three kids should have been bundled into snowsuits, frolicking in the snow at recess outside their Ottawa schools. Instead, we had withdrawn them from school to “homeschool” them for a year while we travelled around the world. Were we nuts?

At that moment, I had to shake my head and say “Yes.”

Homeschooling is challenge enough when you’re at home; taking it on the road, where you can’t carry enough books and can’t buy educational supplies in English, is more difficult than making papier-maché out of gritty Mexican corn flour. Teaching our own children was probably the toughest part of our trip – but the most rewarding too, since they learned far more than they would have in the classroom. And so did we, the two pseudo-teachers. We found ourselves delving more deeply into Mayan, Aboriginal and Thai culture when we had to teach it to our kids. And we had to move beyond our own comfort zones as we taught poetry, chatted with Buddhist monks, and watched cobras getting milked for their venom.

When I delivered my three children back into the official school system, after teaching each of them for an entire grade, it was with a seriously mixed bag of emotions – relief, yes, but also sadness and a sense of loss.

During our trip, our teenager, Tom, was in Grade 8, which comes with an enormously long list of stuff to learn in the Ontario, Canada curriculum. Ten-year-old Elizabeth and seven-year-old Rachel had social studies courses that dovetailed perfectly with our trip. Grade 5 studies Ancient Civilizations while Grade 2 studies Cultures Around the World – ideal for an itinerary that began with a month in Costa Rica and two months in Mexico amongst Mayan and Aztec pyramids. We moved on to Ecuador and the Galapagos for two weeks and farther across the Pacific where we spent six weeks each in New Zealand and Australia. Then we travelled into southeast Asia, where we got a good six-week dose of Buddhist temples in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. We ended with two weeks of practising French in Paris and Normandy before flying home after eight months on the road.

Fortunately, our kids proved to be flexible about where they did their work. Rarely did they encounter desks. They did regular schoolwork on planes, buses, cars and boats, in a cabana beside a sunny turquoise pool, at the feet of Mexican pyramids, on museum benches, and lounging on countless hostel beds.

Unofficial lessons took place climbing a New Zealand glacier, watching a volcano erupt at night in Costa Rica, hiking through rainforests in many countries, touring banana and tea plantations, snorkeling with sea lions and penguins in the Galapagos, whirling and dancing in a Mexican fiesta, diving on the Great Barrier Reef, biking around Buddhist temple ruins, plunking coins into beggars’ outstretched plastic cups, riding elephants and camels, shivering on the D-Day landing beaches and wandering amongst thousands of graves in a Canadian cemetery in Normandy – science, social studies, economics, art, geography and history all jumbled together.

Travelling around the world was something I’d always yearned for since I never got the chance to backpack through Europe during university days. And part of the wisdom that has come to Bill and me in our mid-forties is the understanding that you have to make your dreams happen – no one is going to do it for you. When we realized that homeschooling on a trip would be easier before the kids hit high school, we began making our plans.

We followed the Ontario curriculum, which we downloaded from the education ministry’s website. It conveniently lists everything kids are required to learn, but of course doesn’t tell you how to teach it or what textbooks and workbooks to use.

Officially, once you withdraw your kids from the school system, you aren’t entitled to any help from teachers or schools, as the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board nicely stated in a letter to me.

Unofficially, however, many teachers bent over backwards to help me, recommending texts and workbooks, giving me sample tests, projects and study guides, and lending books. One teacher even came shopping with me to the educational stores, to help me analyse which math and English workbooks looked good. She also offered comments on my “education plan,” which I was required to file with the board, essentially showing them that we could bestow some form of knowledge on our kids. Talking with the board’s homeschooling liaison officer was also a confidence-booster, which I needed as we finally boarded the plane.

Bill and I soon learned the art of flexibility, since many of the noble plans we made had to change on the fly. Kids quickly tire of museums, for example. Any lofty dreams I had of leading eager learners on a fulfilling journey of discovery disappeared faster than snow in Singapore. They dragged themselves, complaining about tired legs, from bench to bench until I hit upon the technique of inventing instant quizzes and scavenger hunts. “What is the melting point of gold?” “Find your favourite painting and tell me why you like it.” Or the all-purpose “Find three interesting facts you didn’t know before.” I was shocked and gratified to find Tom leading the girls in an I Spy game in an Ecuadorian cathedral. They were craning their necks to the gold-bedecked ceiling as he urged them to find a Bible story in a painting. (Answer: Noah’s Ark.)

Outright bribery worked too. I offered pesos, colones, dollars and baht for every grammar or spelling mistake on translated-into-English signs and menus.

But they eagerly soaked up local culture when we discovered kids to play with. They swung on rope swings, played soccer with Hill Tribe children in Thailand, climbed coconut trees, swam, and joined in a Spanish-speaking craft class making clay animals. They were keen to join children in a New Zealand game called spot tag, which required a torch.

“A torch?!” Tom’s eyes lit up at the thought of racing around the yard with flames on a stick.

“Here, a torch means a flashlight,” I informed him, to his acute disappointment.

We had planned to use the internet a lot, making use of the thousands of educational sites. But although internet cafes are ubiquitous, they are sometimes costly, with unreliable connections, with line-ups that discourage you from spending much time, and mostly with no printers. [We travelled with a laptop but no cell phone and wifi, although it existed, was not common.] When Elizabeth was researching the Mayans, we went into town by taxi to surf for info. Where did we end up? On the website of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, right here in Ottawa.

Spanish lessons cost more than we had thought. So we were lucky when, while staying on a farm in the mountains of Costa Rica, we met a young American university grad student who had done some teaching. Katie volunteered to tutor our kids in Spanish for free, while Bill and I had our lessons. She was loads more fun than boring old Mom and Dad. Not only did she teach them their “uno, dos, tres” and the rhyme “a, e, i, o, u, un burro sabe mas que tu” (a donkey knows more than you) but she also sang “I have seen the glory of the burning of the school, we are torturing the teachers, we are breaking all the rules…” with which they have tortured us ever since.

We tried to keep the same schedule as at home, with days off for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter and March Break. However, the kids quickly embraced local traditions and wanted to include them too – Mexico’s weeklong party called Day of the Dead around our Halloween, the December-January summer holidays in New Zealand and Australia, the two-week holiday in France over Easter, and the April summer break in Thailand. 

Our daily teaching schedule varied depending on where we were. At the farm in Costa Rica, we weeded organic vegetables and groomed goats in the mornings and did schoolwork in the afternoons. When we moved on to Isla Mujeres, Mexico, we started the day with schoolwork, leaving us free in the afternoons for other activities. But when we tried that in Oaxaca, Mexico, we found that the city closed down for a two-hour siesta just as we set out to explore. So, siesta hours became school hours. In New Zealand and the highlands of Malaysia, where roads were curvy and winding, schoolwork on the road was impossible without a barf bag for me. And with two left-handed kids, we promptly realized we had to seat them in a certain order in the back seat so they didn’t poke elbows.

Carrying all the books was a chore, even though we’d pared down to what we thought was a bare minimum. Most went into a rolling duffle bag along with extra lined paper, construction paper, a small paint set, glue sticks, and a pencil case loaded with travel-sized office supplies like a stapler and a tape dispenser.

Each student carried some workbooks and their own binder of loose papers in their daypack. We scanned several texts into my laptop for easier reference and mailed completed work home. Bill and I shared a teachers’ binder where we kept lesson plans, the curriculum, and notes. As a journalist, I taught language arts, social studies, history, geography and health. Bill is an engineer, so he tackled the maths and sciences while we shared phys-ed and the arts.   

We had the same old arguments about homework that we would have had in Ottawa. In a perverse way, we found that encouraging, since it indicated our kids were behaving normally and hadn’t been traumatized by being away from home.

Kids don’t change just because you’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on the trip of a lifetime. Without pointing fingers, a student who usually spends more time arguing about why he shouldn’t have to learn algebra than it would take to do the work, will do the same while travelling. And the child who enthusiastically tackles every subject will also be the same, whether they’re laying out their books on a school desk or an airplane flip-down tray.

About two-thirds through our trip, I awoke at 5 a.m., awash in perspiration, my heart pounding after two nightmares. I had dreamt that one of Elizabeth’s teachers had laid out all the kids’ work in the school library and was slowly perusing it – not to see what the kids had learned, but to assess how well Bill and I had taught and marked it! That nightmare then morphed into me proudly showing off how well Rachel could read once we got back from our trip. And Rachel’s teacher, who in reality is a kind, gentle woman, shook her head and sniffed, “Well, no. She’s reading very poorly.” 

In the early dawn light, I crept out of bed and, using a stack of women’s magazines that a waitress had given us, drew up health lesson plans on bulimia and anorexia for Tom and nutrition for the girls (I found a pull-out chart on vitamins). As I cut labels off our cereal box and milk carton, I clarified my fears: getting through the entire curriculum; teaching it well; and marking their work, which we found difficult. Am I being too easy because it’s my own kid? Am I being too hard to compensate for being too easy because it’s my own kid? I sympathize entirely with teachers who hate writing report cards.

We did manage to cover the curriculum, finishing early in spelling, math, and language arts. Once we returned home and the kids got talking to their friends, I realized I’d mistakenly taught Rachel cursive writing when she wasn’t supposed to learn that until Grade 3. And, much to Tom’s disgust, I’d diligently assigned him a project on STDs when none of his friends had had to do that in health class.

When I returned them to school in September for the next school year, part of me felt relieved of that immense responsibility. But behind my smile lurked tears that I shed later in private. I also felt lost, out of control. I had loved knowing what my children were learning and exactly when projects were due. It had thrilled me when I taught a new concept and their faces brightened when they finally understood it.

We held a Grade 8 graduation ceremony for Tom, complete with certificate, and awards for all three for perfect attendance. I was proud of them, and of Bill and me, for successfully completing such a venture into the unknown.

Knowing what we know now, would we do it again?

In a heartbeat.

Kathryn Young is an Ottawa writer and mother of three experienced world travellers.

We travelled around the world from August 2002 to April 2003. Find out where we are right now by visiting our ‘Where’s Kathryn?’ page.