World Schooling

By Randy Zechman
Part Two of Randy Zechman’s (Class XXIX) Blog Series Achieving a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), detailing his family’s 5 month travel around the world. Read Part One here.
Our family has embarked on a 5 month journey to Travel the World. Alisa (wife of 13 years & veterinarian), Maya (11 year old girl), Shae (7 year old girl), and myself (ALF class of XXIX, 50 years old and serial entrepreneur).
The most common questions we have received during our travels- “what about the kids? And school? Are they on holiday for all that time?” After asking the question, we get a similar look that says something between- ‘we are confused’ and ‘aren’t you responsible for educating these kids’.
So what is World Schooling?
In its simplest form, World Schooling is the combination of education and travel. For World Schoolers around the globe, travel is a means of education, and a tool to enhance the educational approach.
The Zechman World School
Our World Schooling set up is split into 2 sections; 1) standard book/workbook type curriculum 2) True World Schooling where we combine a make-it-up-as-we-go/on-the-fly, and non-customary but relevant world/life knowledge. Maya (11) and Shae (7) learn differently, so we adapt our teaching style and exercises to meet their specific needs.
We chose a curriculum that is basically 50% school curriculum (from a book) and 50% world studies. The school curriculum is done through a fair amount of planning with the kids’ private school of the past 6 years- Merryhill.  The school was kind enough to give us workbooks and cover some basic lesson planning and direction for each subject.
The more interesting part is the 50% out-of-book learning our kids are doing. It is the most impactful. We think about World Schooling in a few segments 1) Planned 2) Spontaneous 3) Out of the Box.
For Planned World Schooling, We wrote down some of our goals of studies. Meditation, mindfulness, culture, money/budgeting, and language were all important to us. Three days a week we practice meditation, breathing and centering. Every chance we get, we look for a way to make it practical. For example, if one of the kids has a meltdown, we will ask them to breathe and try to clear the mind so they can resume a mind space that is manageable. We go to some museums, palaces, mosques, and historic places. As you can probably guess, we teach based on what we see. Cultural learning presents itself rather naturally.
As the name suggests, Spontaneous World Schooling happens spur of the moment. One example is Shae and I were just walking around a town in Morocco one day when we wandered upon a line of ants and some ant hills. Shae was curious to watch them, so we just stopped, watched and talked. She was so intrigued how they attacked other bugs that crossed their line and how large some of the treasures they were carrying. In our lives back home, we have struggled to make this kind of time in our busy schedules.
Out of the Box World Schooling is my favorite part. An example of this is something Maya and Shae did last month. Instead of another day in the math book, Maya built a business. Maya developed a dog training business as she loves animals. It was complete with business plan and profit and loss statement. We then adapted the lessons from a particular chapter which happened to be on fractions/decimals. It was so successful, we did the same for Shae who was working on long addition/subtraction.  Shae built a company called Wish Magic that sold fictitious ‘wish magic’. We then educated through the business which was a topic they enjoyed. We explored lots of avenues for almost a month. Each day a different topic like: “this year business is down 25%, how does that affect costs and profit” or even social issues when Shae had a disagreement with one of her key business partners. We discussed how that affected the business financially and culturally.  I noticed their understanding of math concepts grow immensely.
We are about 2.5 months into our journey. I can honestly say I have seen both kids grow by leaps and bounds. The gains in learning is very evident. However, the one on one attention has allowed us to focus on true understanding. This has been the real difference. It has been one of the surprising highlights of our journey. The brilliant part of all of this is World Schooling can be done without actually leaving your country or home.