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Published: January 27th 2006
Jungle Mountain Biking
Elaine and Manya all decked out in protective gear passing through a Hmong village on the way down the mountainPart 9
January 27 Chiang Mai
So much for school time, let alone sitting by the pool time. Between cooking school (7 tasty, full meal size dishes prepared and eaten (with cleanup done by the countless Thai helpers zipping about) in this slick operation with about 20 side by side burners and cooking areas for each person to be their own Food Channel star) or mountain biking (4000+ vertical feet from the summit of Doi Sutep on dirt trails remarkably like Vermont, with washed out tire tracks filled with leaves and pine needle sections to soften the shock) from 9-4, followed by the hour massage ($4), then dinner followed by our nightly rotee (a crepe like dessert with banana, egg, and chocolate cooked in a ton of butter), before you know it is time for bedtime reading. How to fit in math and writing and assorted other organized reflective activities has proved somewhat challenging here.
At the same time, it feels like the kids are learning plenty. Last night, for example, Koby asked what government was exactly, which led to an hour long diagramming of federal, state, and local government and the various branches of government. Another question about
Little Buddha
Will the real Buddha please step forward? religion sparked a lengthy exploration of Buddhism, and later today we plan to go to the "Monk Chat" at a wat (temple) nearby to learn more.
As we travel, it is hard to identify what exactly you can learn in school that you can't learn with more direct experience on the road. Certainly geography and history and almost anything in social studies is far more powerful while traveling. Math can be done suitably by carrying the kids books at home, plus some very immediate experience with computation with exchange rates and shopping. There are plenty of opportunities for writing (although arranging this with our kids is too often a struggle). And science comes through various experiences, some at museums, but much through curiosity about weather and agriculture and physical geography and environmental issues. Much of what schools do is try to bring what we wish kids could learn by direct experience and transmit this to students through more secondary means. This has all got me thinking, again, about the Compass year on the road school, which is highly feasible economically, but harder to figure out for timing and what to do with kids after their 180 days of travel.
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