Ok, on to the nitty gritty. Brenda and I are not really philosophical people. Once we decide, we do. We move forward. Immer geradeaus gehen. I am going to gloss over some of the angst and thought to give some of the answers we found and are using.
Those of you who have known me for a long time cannot say you are truly surprised that I want to 'freak and blow' on a boat. I have been at least a little interested in the idea since I was in high school. It was all just dreaming at the time, though. Now my wife and I had actually decided that we wanted to do it. That is different.
Being the successful over 40 responsible parents of two that we are, we did not just rush right out and go. We decided to do educate ourselves and see how the idea developed within ourselves before we committed. Witness, if you will, this blog post. It has been around nine months since we started this journey, and I am just now comfortable going public about it. There has been a lot of research and thinking over the last nine months.
I dug up and dusted off all the 'research' that I could remember regarding the sailing life. What kind of boat did we think we would like? What is it like out there for the families that are there now? Will the kids like it? How do we educate them? We spent days of time off during the winter on the web looking for info. This is what we found.
First, there are a LOT of people out there with families, and many of them write blogs that you can find on the web. They are all ages and so are their children. I'll give you two examples. Ceilydh Set Sail is a family of three who have been out sailing since 2009. They started in Vancouver and are now in Australia. Windtraveler is a younger couple who have been out for a while. They had a daughter while out cruising, and are now getting ready to go back out with new twins. Probably a little more gung ho than I am, but who am I to judge. They started in Chicago moving toward the Caribbean. Anyway, we found a great deal of first hand reporting available, which was encouraging.
We looked long and hard before we came up with a solution for schooling. The traditional answer is 'unschooling' your kids while you are away. Children are natural sponges when it comes to learning. Left to their own devices they will soak up the information available to them. Given the above mentioned over 40 responsible parenthood of us both, that seemed a little unstructured. While I am not going into all the options, beleive me there are several different levels, ranging from simple lesson plan templates to full online classrooms. Our basically serious nature caused us to lean toward the structured end of those options. We found an institution that fit our needs in Vermont. Oak Meadow Academy provides a full curriculum for all grades through high school, and is an accredited private school. It is used by members of the foreign service, military servicemen and women and other overseas personnel as well as regular distance learning parents in this country. It also appeals to us as one of the few real online/distance educational institutions that is not religion based. That is very important to both of us.
So far we have been very pleased with our choice. We withdrew the children from their schools this past fall and began teaching them here. Alex is in 8th grade with 9th grade Algebra and is doing well. Anna is in 5th grade, but is doubling up her math to go into and finish 6th grade math by the end of this year. We felt that starting this now would give both the us and the children a good chance to get this right before we add to it by moving around full time. Like I said, it is going well. Both children enjoy getting up late and doing their work in their pajamas. Brenda serves as schoolmaster and tutor wherever needed. Alex is mostly independent, doing his work on Google Docs and turning his assignments in every two weeks to his teacher, who is a retired instructor with thirty years experience at an all boys private school in Massachusetts. Anna works well, if a little less independently. She also turns her lessons in every two weeks, but Brenda is much more active in her teaching. The curriculum is actually more rigorous than we had expected. As an example, Anna has fifteen lessons in her Science textbook to complete this week, including starting a three week experiment in burying various items in soil to see what the effects are. I can't wait to dig up three week old lettuce to find out what happened. The focus is on real, concrete learning.
That was the first real step to going. Now it seems real. Other things happened along the way, mostly dealing with the whole 'how will we all deal with being on a boat and can we really do it?' fear. That will have to wait for the next post.
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