Powell Berger
BRIGHT Magazine
Published in
8 min readJul 24, 2017

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Photograph courtesy of Powell Berger

MyMy y daughter first heard the term “project-based learning” when she eavesdropped on a conversation between another parent and me. (Like many 12-year-old girls, she considered eavesdropping an art form essential to her knowledge base.) The woman excitedly talked about this radical new idea her child’s school was embracing — eliminate the divisions between core subjects and give students a project that incorporates everything from math and science to literature and written works.

“Isn’t that home-schooling?” my daughter asked later, when the woman was out of earshot. I smiled. At that point in her education, Emerson had researched the marine life of the Great Barrier Reef and could talk about the impact of climate change on the reef’s diversity. She’d studied World War II, starting in Honolulu (our home) with the Pearl Harbor attack, and then from Washington, D.C. to Germany to France to Southeast Asia and Australia. She’d interviewed an elderly German woman who remembered hiding in their potato cellar and measuring the intensity of the bombing by the reverberations. She’d come to understand the Holocaust from a child’s perspective through books like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and The Devil’s Arithmetic. She’d discovered she loves math — particularly the magic of long division — that prepositions are “squirrel” words (because they place the squirrel in relation to the tree — on, over, behind, off, near, and so on), and that when there are only two in her class — her brother and her — she could get longer snack time if he needed more one-on-one attention.

Home school was never something I imagined I’d do. I worked; my kids went to school; we took family vacations when we could. The word itself conjured images of the fringe — something of the religious right or doomsdayers, not the purview of politically engaged, business-owning, PTA-member parents like me.

I was wrong.

Inspiration comes when you’re not looking. In my case, it was my son’s disastrous relationship with his teacher in third grade followed by his more disastrous fourth grade math scores. His younger sister had sailed through since PreK, always the teacher’s pet but rarely ever challenged. For the chunk of money I was spending for private school (that same school that eventually rolled out project-based learning), maybe I could do it better. Maybe we could travel, see those places they studied. We could create our own curriculum, and we could tap into their personal curiosities — something that, especially for my son, had gone dormant in a traditional classroom. Maybe I could even get him back, that little boy who’d once had so much enthusiasm and curiosity who now came home angry and sad.

It’s not easy, deciding to turn your children’s education on its head. Maybe it takes hubris, or temporary insanity, or a bit of both.

My oldest child, safely off to college when these discussions began, made his views clear. “Oh god, Mom!” he said. “Don’t have your midlife crisis by home-schooling Austin and Emerson.” He had a point.

But, I figured, they could both read (a skill I can’t imagine teaching) and they could follow basic instructions. And we had a fortunate set of circumstances. My business allowed me to work remotely — from home at first, and then from the far corners of the planet as we traveled. Reallocating that tuition money bought a lot of travel, particularly when trips spanned weeks, not days, and lodging was in hostels, not hotels. The kids and I decided we’d try it for one year, see if we liked it, and every year thereafter, we’d reconsider. Going back to traditional school was always an option — just one that never came up again.

TTThe misnomer of home school is that you go it alone. Home school co-ops among families abound, and my kids were soon doing drama workshops, Shakespeare classes, science labs and communications programs. Art classes, speech and debate teams, soccer, and other clubs filled their calendars when we were home. On our travels, they found friends in every country, many of whom remain close-by through social media and Skype — and quite often on our sofa when their travels bring them our way.

It’s been over eight years since traditional school convened one fall without my kids at their appointed desks. On our first day at home, I’m sure I was more nervous than my kids, gathering them right on time at our designated school table and following our strict schedule, complete with lesson plans, snack breaks and bathroom breaks. As these things do, routine took over and in a few short weeks, it seemed second nature. By year’s end, our schedule had become more of a suggestion than an absolute, and we found ourselves pulling the threads that captivated us. As they got older, my role as “teacher” morphed into “mentor,” and at times the line between parent and teacher blurred.

It became what we do, learning together — whether at the school table, the supermarket, or at the beach.

Rather than it being “school” every day, it became a way of life, with my kids often coming to me with projects they wanted to pursue, areas they wanted to investigate.

Emerson became captivated by astronomy for a while, pulling us to the backyard late at night and to the planetarium at Bishop Museum during the day. Austin became the family expert on sharks, with us ending up in a cage to swim with various sharks on Oahu and in open waters to swim with whale sharks in western Australia.

LLLooking back at that first day, I’m grateful I didn’t know everything, but that I knew enough to take the risk. When “road schooling,” as we called it, we covered some 50 countries in five years. We took writing and art workshops in Paris, took an overnight train from Bejing to Xian to see the terracotta warriors, and had geeky grammar conversations on the backs of elephants in Laos. My adventurous son snorkeled between the tectonic plates in Iceland, water so cold that three of the 10 adventurers bowed out before even leaving the water’s edge. My daughter held a live octopus at a fish market in Seoul, amazement and sheer joy on her face as he slithered out of her hands, down her arms, and attempted to escape into the streets before being tossed back into the tank by the fishmonger.

I no longer have the career flexibility I once had, so our travels are fewer and farther between. Our adventures are more local now, with our classrooms found at film festivals and science fairs and lecture series. We have a treasure trove of travel tales, inside jokes, adventures and misadventures, and more than a few moments when someone ended up in tears. I survived every home-school parent’s worst fear — creating my son’s high school transcript so he could apply to college, and my daughter is largely self-directed now, needing less and less of me as she looks towards college and beyond.

Like any mother whose children are finding their wings, I’m wistful, thinking about the things we didn’t do, wondering if they got enough of everything.

Did they read the right books or get enough science? Will they look back some day and realize they missed out on prom and homecoming? Will they someday seek therapy and look into the counselor’s knowing eyes and furrowed brow as they tell the stories of their non-traditional education?

Maybe, but mainly I think they’ll be just fine.

Mostly, I’m so glad we took the risk — something way outside the lines for this fairly conventional mom. Somehow, we found the time, and had either the courage or the lunacy to defy conventional wisdom and follow our own path. I’m also acutely aware that the benefits of that private school tuition money, a flexible job, the convenience of technology, and our ability to leverage our home for home exchanges or fill it with renters made our adventures possible. In our life, in that moment, that combination of factors was a gift. But I also know it took seeing that potential and running with it — following the guidance of other families already out there, living this lifestyle — that made it happen.

Almost a decade since I started researching the notion, I’m sure of exactly three things (and unsure of untold numbers of other things):

  • Curiosity, not grade level, fuels real learning, and as adults, we become the best teacher when we shed our façade of having the answers and instead join our kids in their curiosity.
  • Every person learns differently, and lining kids up in neat rows of desks requiring them to read the same work and do the same assignments is a recipe for failure. Or, as the saying goes, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
  • And lastly, home schooling or road schooling or whatever you choose to call it should not be exclusive to those with privilege — flexible jobs, income, race, ethnicity or support system. Whether it’s 50 countries over five years or five parks in the next town over, the adventure and the learning happen when time and space is dedicated to it. Just as we sit on the floor with a toddler and build towers of bricks only to knock them over and build them again, we can continue to dedicate that time to our children as they get older, whether in traditional schools or home schooling. And just like that tower of bricks, we learn more, and we have more fun, when we let our children lead.

Convention has us outsourcing our children’s education — sending them off to kindergarten and expecting them college-ready by their senior year. But what if we do just a little bit more? What if we bring math skills with us to the supermarket, talk about the plot and theme of the movies we watch, even simply discuss current events and relate it back to whatever they might be studying in school? At home, maybe we, too, can break down those divisions, knock down the wall between “home” and “school” and find the link between the two.

A college junior now, Austin is spending the summer in Greece, volunteering at a Syrian refuge camp. He started planning this trip last year, saving money from two jobs so he could pay for it. When an earthquake rattled the region recently, I held my breath while I checked the map for proximity. Hundreds of miles away, he slept right through it, only aware of it when he awoke to texts from me and his friends. Emerson heads out tonight for Washington, D.C., where she’ll participate in an ACLU program on social justice, made possible by a scholarship she received during the application process. She has to cut her trip shorter than she’d like — her dog-walking jobs keeps her busy at home and her internship with our U.S. senator’s local office starts in just a few weeks.

We don’t use that term “project-based learning” much. Truthfully, we never did. For my two kids, it’s how they grew up — figuring it out and making the pieces come together. Math, science, English, and literature rarely come at us in neat little packages in real life. Why should school be any different?

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Writer, strategist, communicator, storyteller. At home in Honolulu. Or Paris. Or Sydney. Or someplace else. http://www.powellberger.com