What’s it really like homeschooling kids while traveling? What are the tools and resources that help us with boatschooling? How is technology part of our everyday life, especially as it relates to learning?
These are the questions Jason wants to demystify. But backing up: Jason and his wife Keiko met as teachers, and have a really interesting story. More recently (most of the last two decades) they’ve lived in Asia and spent years in high-pressure jobs in Tokyo. Rewarding in many ways, but frustrating in others. So they quit, and they’ve been traveling since with their two kids.
We met up last year in Penang, Malaysia, thanks to the family on Love Song (who had connected with the traveling Jenkins crew through Families On The Move, a great resource for nomadic families to find and support each other). They’re long term travelers, just the land-voyaging yin to our seagoing yang; our families clicked, and I wish we’d had more time together.
Why is he doing this? In his words: “Epic Education Radio was a podcast that *I* wanted to listen to — it didn’t exist yet, so I made it myself. I wanted to create a resource that spotlighted traveling families and how their lifestyle worked — less about why they chose this lifestyle, and more about how they pull it off.” I can really understand this- it’s how I felt about writing Voyaging With Kids!
You can find Epic Education Radio on iTunes; my conversation with Jason is the third episode (highlights and links to stream are on the website). He’s got a standard set of questions that he uses with each family, which I imagine best serves to show how many ways there are to support learning while being nomadic. Check out the first episode, where he runs through how his own family would respond to the same questions.
I’m looking forward to having better bandwidth (ahhhh Seychelles… almost a month away!) and listening to more episodes, because I think cruising families have a lot to learn from the families that choose land travel. Thank about it: we have a WHOLE FLOATING CAMPERVAN to load up with stuff. I don’t think I could lift a box with all the books our neighbor boat’s kid has for one year of Calvert. And of course, we are terribly proud of our Encyclopedia set. But most globe-trotting families are working with what’s in a couple of backpacks. WOW. No question, there’s going to be a lot to learn for resources and how-tos from Jason’s podcast. Plus, I get to compare tech, and once a tech geek- always a tech geek!
Thanks Jason. This was fun, and I can’t wait to learn more!
[We’re somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean! This post was scheduled before we left Maldives. We’ll be mostly offline until we reach Seychelles in late June, and look forward to reading and responding once we hit the land of high bandwidth again.]
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