Rainer Jenss and his family are currently on an around-the-world
journey, and they're blogging about their experiences for us at
Intelligent Travel. Keep up with the Jensses by bookmarking their posts, and follow the boys' Global Bros blog at National Geographic Kids.
It's strange, but we're seven months into our trip and I still get a bit flustered filling out the immigration forms upon our arrival in a new country. This has nothing to do with being worried about getting through or the process itself. It's that darn line that asks for your current residence! Carol and I still deliberate whether we should use the old address of the house we sold in New York before leaving or my parents' in New Jersey where we forward our mail.
The truth is that we don't have a home right now. To honor this state of affairs, I bought one of those "Life Is Good" t-shirts with a sketch of planet Earth on it that says "Home Sweet Home," which seems only fitting for what we're doing. I've also told the boys that "home is where the heart is," and when someone wants to know where we live, they can simply answer, "right here." So when people ask us what we are doing about the kids' education, it's not really accurate to say we are home schooling them. Instead, they are being taught on the road. They are not being "schooled," they're getting educated, and there's a subtle difference.
In the event that anyone from Tyler and Stefan's old school district is reading this, I'm happy to report that Carol has been very diligent in keeping the boys up to speed with their 3rd and 6th grade English and math curriculum. She's certainly logging in the hours with them, albeit on airplanes, in hotel rooms and during odd hours and weekends. It's nearly impossible to keep any kind of regular schedule when you're busy visiting extraordinary places and experiencing new things practically every day, so I give both the boys and my wife a ton of credit. As such, this family has very little down time. While we were with our friends in South Africa, I secretly took pleasure in watching them attempt, with little success, to get their children to do some of the schoolwork they'd be missing during the two-week trip.
It's strange, but we're seven months into our trip and I still get a bit flustered filling out the immigration forms upon our arrival in a new country. This has nothing to do with being worried about getting through or the process itself. It's that darn line that asks for your current residence! Carol and I still deliberate whether we should use the old address of the house we sold in New York before leaving or my parents' in New Jersey where we forward our mail. The truth is that we don't have a home right now. To honor this state of affairs, I bought one of those "Life Is Good" t-shirts with a sketch of planet Earth on it that says "Home Sweet Home," which seems only fitting for what we're doing. I've also told the boys that "home is where the heart is," and when someone wants to know where we live, they can simply answer, "right here." So when people ask us what we are doing about the kids' education, it's not really accurate to say we are home schooling them. Instead, they are being taught on the road. They are not being "schooled," they're getting educated, and there's a subtle difference.
In the event that anyone from Tyler and Stefan's old school district is reading this, I'm happy to report that Carol has been very diligent in keeping the boys up to speed with their 3rd and 6th grade English and math curriculum. She's certainly logging in the hours with them, albeit on airplanes, in hotel rooms and during odd hours and weekends. It's nearly impossible to keep any kind of regular schedule when you're busy visiting extraordinary places and experiencing new things practically every day, so I give both the boys and my wife a ton of credit. As such, this family has very little down time. While we were with our friends in South Africa, I secretly took pleasure in watching them attempt, with little success, to get their children to do some of the schoolwork they'd be missing during the two-week trip.
Continue reading Jenss Family Travels: Lessons from the Road.
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