The Pivot

Shortening our worldschooling but potentially elongating our time abroad

When we started worldschooling in early November (of 2023) we intended to explore the world for upwards of a year. The rough goal was to stay for about a month in a variety of places, with some faster travel sprinkled in. We knew that the ease of homeschooling changes once kids finish 8th grade, but we figured Shelby could start 9th grade while traveling and then ease into school somewhere; we’d track her credits and even put her in a more structured online school if need be. If only we had known then what we know now (and all that’s to come)!

Let’s just say that my birthday in mid-November was perhaps the worst birthday I’ve ever had. Why? It’s the day I told Chris what I had learned the day prior: That if you start homeschooling in 9th grade, you pretty much have to commit to homeschooling all the way through high school. Why? Because US schools don’t have to (and in many cases won’t) accept homeschool credits once a child starts high school. What does that mean? Let’s say your child worldschools/homeschools all through 9th grade and has their classes and credits properly documented, with a transcript. A public school has to take them back, but they don’t have to accept their credits. So you your child may be ready to go into 10th grade, but the school may make them start back over in 9th grade.

That’s crazy, right?! So I went down a rabbit hole in the homeschool community trying to understand whether this was really true. Alas, in many cases, it seems to be. Are there exceptions? Sure. But your best bet is to coordinate ahead of time with the school your kid will return to and make sure that you follow a curriculum the school will recognize and accept. (Many have very narrow and limited options, unfortunately.)

I suppose this is fairly straightforward if you know where your kid will be going to school after their gap year. However, we don’t even know which state we would go back to, let alone which district or school. And let’s not even throw in the curve ball of another country at this point. Oy vey. The bottom line based on what we learned in mid-November was that to be safe, we needed to cut our travel time basically in half. Instead of leisurely traveling from Nov-Oct, we needed to travel from Nov-May or so to give ourselves time to land somewhere and get the kids enrolled back in school before the new school year starts.

This discovery put a MAJOR damper on things. Chris rarely melts down. He’s probably the most even-keeled person I know. But he came apart at the seams. He was so upset that he suggested we give up and go back. What was even the point of traveling if we had to truncate it so much? Since he’s normally my rock and I’m the emotional one, I was thrown for a loop. We spent the whole afternoon freaking out, trying to decide if we’d just made the worst decision of our lives (to have started worldschooling at all).

Once we sort of calmed down, I convinced him that we may as well keep going since I’d already quit my job and we’d pulled the girls from school. If it meant traveling for a shorter amount of time, then so be it. It wasn’t what we had imagined, but it was still an amazing opportunity and our one shot to travel uninterrupted until after the kids graduate, so we may as well see it through as best we could.

But it meant that we weren’t going to be able to travel slowly. And that shift has had pretty big ramifications for our travels. It has meant that we’ve felt burned out and unmoored at times. Constantly changing locations is exhausting. It’s also more expensive. Most people who worldschool longer term do so successfully by slowing down. This saves money and sanity and allows families to connect with other families. We knew this is what we’d be trading off and, while I’m glad we’ve continued to travel, it’s definitely been difficult at times and I wouldn’t recommend fast traveling for more than 6-12 weeks tops.

I spend a lot of time researching flights and looking for accommodations. I really don’t fancy being a travel agent, at least for us. It’s stressful. There’s so much research and there are so many decisions to be made; decision fatigue is real. Again, if we could slow down, we wouldn’t have to make as many decisions, nor as often. But this is the tradeoff we made to keep going on a compressed timeline. And while we could cut some locations out, other locations are places we might consider seeking residency in. And that’s also part of the pivot that we’ve made.

We’re now seriously considering trying to get residency in another country so that we can keep gaining international experience and exposure while also providing the girls with a more structured school environment, with official documentation. Is there a guarantee their credits will transfer/translate back to a US school? No, but the chances are hopefully greater. The girls don’t mind being abroad (they like certain aspects of it), but they need to slow down. The constant change is hard on them, and they want friends. This solution could be a win-win, but adding in research about international schools and residency abroad has been supremely challenging. And then trying to map all this out on the fly in our compressed timeline is basically a recipe for lunacy.

Don’t get me wrong: We’ve had some amazing adventures and have seen some very different parts of the world that have definitely opened our aperture. I think we would’ve regretted throwing in the towel. But I would probably do a lot of things differently based on what we now know, and I think the family would do things differently still from me. At some point we’ll look back retrospectively and share more of our reflections, but since we’re still in the middle of traveling and making life decisions, it seems premature to do it now, though I can tell you for sure that having more of a plan is definitely something that could’ve helped. I’ve never made so many spontaneous decisions with far reaching implications in my life!

Stay tuned to see how things pan out. As of now, even we have no idea. And if you have some perspective or words of wisdom for us, we’re willing to consider it. We realize our decisions may not be ones you’d make and that’s okay!