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NEWS RELEASE
For Immediate Release
Contact: Mary Lois Sennewald
314-602-8065
marymspirit@aol.com
ROADSCHOOLING—WHEN THE WHOLE WORLD IS A CLASSROOM
“I always thought there were better ways to educate our sons than to stick them indoors all day,” writes Mary Lois Sennewald in Roadschooling Ryan: Learn as We Go.
So, to prove her point, this sixty-year-old mother and seventeen-year-old son, Ryan B. Costello, left St. Louis in August, 2002, in a 1987 VW camper van. Their purpose: to see the world, take this one year of homeschooling onto the Open Road. For two semesters, they wandered up the Mississippi, across Canada to the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, down through New England (and Colonial History), deep into southern Mexico, finally coming to rest in Colorado high country.
Why? Because Sennewald believed that Ryan would learn more by seeing the continent and talking to people in other places and cultures than by spending hours in the classroom. Because, after mulling over educational theories and stories for decades, she wanted to give her own ideas a try. Because she wanted to kick Ryan out of complacency and into a new orbit. Because she was a traveler to her core and she desired to share her roaming skills with her son.
Roadschooling Ryan: Learn as We Go is a provocative account of bears and wolves, foibles and family, missteps, friendship, homeschooling rigors and magical moments. It challenges preconceptions about education, values and parental partnerships. By turns funny, poignant, and heart-warming, it is the story of a young man on the brink of adulthood peering into the world, and a mother insisting on doing his schooling her way. It is also about survival, relative sanity, and compassion in very close quarters, about astonishment, about having a great time, no matter what.
Sennewald does not flinch from reporting the trials of such a year, her mistakes and poor judgments. But neither does she minimize the ecstatic moments powerful enough to mark the two of them for a lifetime. Although written as a memoir rather than as a guide, anyone fascinated by the idea of loading up the car with books and kids and setting off can find plenty of practical information.
With all the frustration, dissatisfaction and questions about today’s schools, Roadschooling Ryan: Learn as We Go provides a glimpse into a world of possibilities.
More information on the odyssey is available at www.learnaswego.com.
Roadschooling Ryan: Learn as We Go is available in hardcover and paperback through www.iUniverse.com, www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com. It can also be ordered through local bookstores.