Homeschooling in the Car

January 8, 2008

Traveling

In the beginning of 2008 I took a 9-6 Mon-Fri job. It is the first time I had had a traditional schedule in over 10 years. In the last decade I have either run my own business or been in grad school. The one 40 hour a week job I did have was at my discretion. During some of that time I had RocketBoy in daycare or pre-school. We could come and go as we (mostly) pleased. I also worked my rear off, often working crazy hours, but at least I decided when to come and go. The same for my husband – he’s been a freelance artist for his entire working career. Needless to say, the workaday job only lasted a few months – it felt somehow undignified to have to ask someone for a day off or an adjustment to my hours.

I got the same feeling when we had RocketBoy in the public school. When we missed a day I got a call from the central office, notifying me that he was out and giving a stern warning that if he missed more than 10% of the school days he would not be eligible for promotion to the next grade. That’s reassuring if you’ve got a older kid who might be skipping school, but for a 6 year old it just feels a bit big brother-ish.

Why do I even mention this - because today we are homeschooling in the car as we drive from Maine to NYC. Sure it’s limited, but we were able to go through about 40 pages of a workbook covering all the basics. In addition we had all sorts of neat discussions about geography and weather. We read a couple of books and RocketBoy got to listen to a few stories on the iPod – greek mythology this time.

One thing I am very glad about is that neither of us get car sick.