Once upon a time in ‘94 – really it was about 1989 or 1990, my family and I packed up and moved to Delaware from North Carolina for my dad’s job. After several months, my mom decided this was not the place for our family and we trekked back to NC. When we arrived back ‘home’ and I was reacclimated into our old scholastic life (4th-5th grade) it was discovered I was significantly ahead of my classmates. Multiple perfect scores on standardized testing indicated I should probably be two grades ahead of the level I was assigned. But at that time, NC did not support kids skipping grades and I spent part of my childhood grading my teacher’s papers. I can safely say I was never challenged until college, at which point I failed calculus miserably and had no idea how to study and make the situation any better. Thus, for me, I’ve had a decades long running question about our school system. However, it wasn’t until I had kids, that I felt I needed to really explore this question and find power over it. With two kids in public school, this question came back and began haunting me more than ever. And my husband started having questions of his own. 

So, together we have chosen to embark on yet another journey of discovery. One where we will tell you about our findings and questions around traditional public schooling and one where you can discover for yourself whether or not we find what works for our family. I can almost certainly say at this point without radical transformation, our kids will not go back to traditional public school in its current form.

My husband took on the task of figuring out which schooling tools and programs would work best for our kids while traveling. We knew we had concerns about the utility of public education, but as we progressed through their final year of public school, we found our questions only grew deeper. Because of regimented schedules, the kids weren’t able to pursue subjects where they showed curiosity or had genuine interest. Some of the older kids we knew and questioned – kids that were deemed ‘the smartest in their classes’, had no knowledge around tools such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning like ChatGPT. Nor did they understand the impact these technologies were having on their everyday life, and the role they could play into the future. On their current path, would our kids really be educated and prepared to succeed? Were they being taught and rewarded for problem-solving, which is probably the most valuable skillset you can have in life, or were they  being taught and rewarded based on their ability to recall information and answer test questions accurately? All big questions that plagued us. 

So, let’s start with C1, our oldest daughter and her K-3 journey….