Reset and Chapter Two
Well, hello there, friends. It’s good to see you again.
I hope you’ve had a good summer. We were in California for most of the season, and the weather where we were oscillated between lovely and too stinking hot. But! It was rejuvenating to be back and visit with friends and family.
Around the time we left Vancouver in June, our plans for the coming school year gelled. We are forming a Traveling School with five other families! We’ll move through a few countries, together with a teacher we’ve hired—a sort of mobile learning pod. All the children are between eight and twelve years old, and the teacher we’ve hired is experienced in teaching these grade levels in the US and at an international school in Indonesia.
J, the woman who pulled all this together, is a mom whose family participated in a similar traveling group last year. With that experience under her belt, she had a clear vision for the group she was putting together (which inspired our confidence). One parameter she set for our cohort was to include children only in the age range of 8 to 12 years old, so the teacher could target lesson plans to confident readers who were all at similar learning readiness.
J interviewed all the potential families and potential teachers, picked participants, and it’s her proposed itinerary we’ll be following—an itinerary that includes Italy, Morocco, Egypt, Israel, and Greece.
The school will be set up in some ways like a traditional school, running from 9 am to 3 pm, with a mix of classroom learning, outdoor play, and field trips. Teacher B will be looking for locally-based learning opportunities everywhere we go, including partnering with local NGOs so the children can learn and contribute as global citizens; in Essaouira, Morocco, for example, local children gather on Sundays to learn English in a little alleyway. We hope to have our kids attend while we are there, to make friends and converse in English with the local students. Us parents are also encouraged to contribute to the learning experience, such as chaperoning field trips or leading experiments. Taz and I look forward to actively participating.
Here’s the school schedule that B shared for this first leg in Italy. We will spend five weeks in Torino and five weeks down south in a small Campania seaside town:
Sample Daily Academic Schedule: (ideally 4 days/week with at least one full day excursion)
9:00-9:30 Community Circle
9:30-10:00 Let’s Speak Italian!
10:00-10:15 Snack Break
10:15-12:00 Core Content:(Literacy/Math/Science/History)
12:00-1:00 Lunch
1:00-2:45 Explore (cooking, community exploration, project based learning, outdoor play, team builders, etc)
2:45- 3:00 Closing Circle and Reflections
One of the questions B asked on a parent survey was, “ By the end of our time in Italy, I want my child…” Among other desires, Taz and I wrote that we’d like Beanie to gain an understanding of what the Roman Empire, Renaissance, and World War II meant for the people of Italy. That’s simple enough to cover in 10 weeks, right? OK, perhaps we are expecting too much…but I’m curious how B will incorporate our local cultural environments into her lessons. J has said that in picking our teacher, she was looking for not only great teaching skills but also someone who was an experienced traveler and highly adaptable. It takes a special kind of teacher to develop culturally relevant lesson plans on the fly, while working in a new “schoolhouse” every five weeks.
I wrote previously about how my secondary school learning of World War II was radically different from what’s taught in US high schools. In Singapore, we focused much more on the Asian theater than the European theater of war, and I learned little about the Holocaust or Nazism—just as US students learn almost nothing about Japanese atrocities in WWII. It only struck me as an adult how non-universal basic educational curricula are, beyond math and science. It’s made me wonder what other enormous swathes of important knowledge are missing, in different ways, from all our formal education systems. And how can we make a conscious effort to do better when it comes to our children’s educations?
While we were back in the Bay Area, the tenants in our family home moved out and new tenants moved in. In between tenants, we got to spend a few days in our own house. It was a nice reset, and made us appreciate all the benefits of being in our own space, including the treasures in our backyard.
When Beanie was two years old, she loved eating nectarines, so we planted a baby nectarine tree in our garden. Seven years later, the tree produces the most delicious and sweet nectarines. They are little bursts of flavor, and our tree produces prolifically considering how small it is.
Summer is nectarine season, but by the time we moved temporarily back into our home, there were no nectarines left on the tree…bar one. We were disappointed not to have a fruitful bounty, but happy the fruit had been picked and enjoyed rather than left to rot and be pecked at by birds. We were delighted by that one lovely tiny overlooked nectarine still hidden between branches, which we proceeded to split three ways. Each of us got a couple of juicy bites. Mmm…The next day, we went to Taz’s sister’s house. In her backyard was a nectarine tree, its branches so heavy with fruit our brother-in-law had jerry-rigged a branch support system using ropes. We picked a big bagful of nectarines to bring home and enjoy; like the ones from our tree, they were small but intensely sweet and flavorful.
Perhaps the universe surprised us with this abundance once we proved we would be sufficiently appreciative? Perhaps, ha.
This summer, Beanie has gotten to play with her cousins and friends in both California and Ontario. She reconnected with two friends from her public elementary school in Walnut Creek, whom she hadn’t played with in a long while. In each case, they picked up as if no time had passed. Though we haven’t been stationary for the past few years, we’ve made an effort to help Beanie keep in touch with her friends and family. Return visits have created constants and the opportunity for joyous reunions. We want to continue encouraging and facilitating these connections. As an adult, I appreciate the friendships I’ve had since childhood—now going on 30 or 40 years. Not cultivating these special longstanding relationships is the big downside to not staying in one school; if we can somehow help her strengthen the bonds she’s made, I’ll be very glad.
Beanie also enjoyed a bit of quality time with her swing at home, which she had missed. She still loves a nice, long swing while daydreaming and making up stories in her head. Her swing is looking a bit worse for the wear these days, but I hope it will hold up until we return and she can get another season of daydreams from it.
We left for Europe this past Tuesday and broke up our flights with a short stay in Dublin. Now we have landed in the northern Italian city of Torino, where we’ll start our first five-week school session. Have I mentioned that we’ve never met the other families whom we are traveling with? Not even over Zoom? It’s a bit of a leap of faith. We will see them for the first time this afternoon at a picnic in the park. I sure hope we all get along! We are technically (and financially) only committed for the first semester, so if it all goes sideways, perhaps we’ll be changing course midway.
Will we be gladdened to meet kindred spirits with a shared sense of purpose? Or will we regret hitching up with a group of strangers with whom we have almost nothing in common?
Stay tuned to find out…
Pretty Good Things
Running errands with friends
While at home in Walnut Creek, a friend (hi Peggy!) and I met up to run errands together. We went to Target and Trader Joe’s, getting stuff done while we chatted. Such a nice, low-key, useful way to catch up with friends when you feel too busy, without having to make a big plan and carve out special time to meet. I really must remember to propose this with people I care about; I might get to see them more often.