Roadschooling Ryan:
Learn As We Go

Excerpt from the Introduction

On August 16, 2002, my son, Ryan and I left St. Louis and headed north up the Great River Road along the Mississippi. This was the beginning of our great experiment: a junior year spent traveling across the continent. We were going because he was ready for something different, something to fire his passion for life. We were going because I believed that there are often better ways to learn than sitting in a classroom. Travel ranks with the best. That is my belief.

My son and I had just settled into our hotel in Quebec City, on the fiery autumn afternoon before Canadian Thanksgiving, when things between us went south.

“You always do this,” Ryan said accusingly, as I hunted for my glasses and the keys to the van. He had pulled himself up to his full five feet, ten inches, and glared down at me, blue eyes glinting with exasperation.

“Do what?”

“Lose something you need. You never put things in one place.”

“I thought I was doing well.”

He rolled his eyes. That’s what did it for me, his rolling his eyes. Teenagers!

What had I been thinking when I dreamed up this traveling year, anyway? Did I really think a 17 year old could learn more camping across the continent with his mom than fidgeting with his buddies in a classroom? Or that we could stay on good terms for months on end?

This junior-year journey had really got going on an overcast St. Louis day the previous January. The letter I held from our sons’ high school mirrored ones which arrived each year, and each year added to the hangover of unpaid Christmas bills. It was what you’d expect from a private college prep institution: impeccably reasoned, persuasively worded. In order to maintain excellence, tuition for the 2002-2003 school year would increase to $12,300. Etc. There was no mention of hundreds of dollars for books, baseball uniforms, annual giving campaign.

Cabin fever crouched in the corner of my office, ready to pounce. Did Ryan, who had just shuffled in, sense her presence? Wind rattled the windows, bringing messages from afar. Could he hear?

I handed him the letter. “We could do a lot of traveling for that money.”

Naturally he would shrug off such absurdity. Lately I had been ranting about education a lot. I figured he was immune.

No. Let me come clean. I didn’t figure that at all. My remark was deliberately aimed to tease his own wanderlust and tempt him out of his sophomore malaise.

“Let’s do it,” he said. .And I looked at my son slouched against my cluttered bookcase next to my cluttered desk, and believed he meant it.

Bulls-eye!

If Ryan had been thrilled with school—o.k., “thrilled” was too optimistic, “reasonably happy” would do—I might never have started down this path. True, after futzing around his junior high classes, defending solid Cs with “What’s wrong with average?”, he settled into a respectable “B” grade point. But though he loved to hang with his friends, play drums and gear up for baseball, he approached the rest of his life with an ennui I found disturbing. Nothing academic grabbed him. Ditto for extracurriculars and part-time work. The vacuum, as I saw it, was filled with an inordinate amount of television, video games and, I worried, a substance which he claimed was less dangerous than alcohol.

This concern was not new. Two years earlier, perplexed as to why our son, in childhood so precocious in language and math, now struggled, we sent him to an educational psychologist. Her conclusions after a battery of tests: Ryan had high arousal needs. Unless he was excited about a subject, he couldn’t stay focused. Second, he was primarily an audial/visual learner. She suggested he read his assignments aloud, to help him remember, or, if that wasn’t feasible, to mouth the words to himself. Third, he could not multitask in the classroom. Forget taking notes or copying an outline from the board if the teacher were lecturing. Finally, he needed to be personally involved with what he was learning. Which came right back to -- high arousal needs.

“Let’s do it,” he said.

I had long cherished the view that there were better ways to educate our sons than to stick them indoors all day. Before they popped out on this planet, my husband, Chip, and I had spent three years with backpacks, working our way around the world. It was the education of a lifetime, we told ourselves. When the kids were younger, I amused myself by mapping out National Parks where David and Ryan and I could camp for weeks at a time. In these wild treasures, we might spend weeks studying local ecology and economies, history, even literature.

“You go, Girl,” Chip would say, when I rambled on about studying the bison herds in Yellowstone or the ancient Puebloans at Mesa Verde. But for one reason or another—their friends, their sports, my projects--the timing never felt right.

Then I blinked, and suddenly David was a senior, planning for college. For Ryan, for me, the time seemed right.

“Do it,” Chip said, when I recounted our conversation, in the offhand manner I use when I’m thinking hard about something big and am testing the waters. He had just returned from a sales trip. And we sipped wine and caught up on our week while outside our window dusk thickened to night.

“You’ve talked about this for years. Now’s your chance.”

I had expected him to say that, my partner of 28 years. He was only two months past his nineteenth birthday when he moved in with me, a 32-year-old woman. If that doesn’t qualify for an adventuresome spirit, I don’t know what does. Though young, he was the first man I knew with physical prowess to make me feel safe wandering around remote corners of the planet, and the derring-do to want to go.

“Think about it for a week or two, I told Ryan, now that we had Chip’s blessing. “We’ll talk about it again.”

But in my heart I was already sure.

Now, nine months later, we were squared off in a Quebec hotel room,grotty from the road, furious. I slammed the door—so much for communication skills—and stomped down the stairwell to the front desk. There lay both keys and glasses. Well, he forgets things, too, I muttered to myself. At least I’ve got a six-decade-old brain as my excuse. What’s his?
The jump from self-justification to self-pity is a short one.

What about the good times and all we’ve seen so far, Ryan, I demanded aloud, walking back upstairs. Bears and wolves. Montreal and …you know, so many experiences that we can’t cram them onto my calendar, as you’ve pointed out many a time. Can you imagine a cooler junior year?

Well, can you?

I punctuated that outburst with a thrust of my jaw.

The business-suited man in the corridor eyed me strangely. Caught, but I’ve talked aloud to myself for decades. Redfaced, I darted into our hotel room.

Inside, though, the emotional weather had changed. Partly-cloudy, mostly fair. Ryan just needed that five-minute break.

The real reason for the turmoil, he said, flicking off the TV in a gesture of conciliation, was that he was worried.

“What if I don’t get credit for the year? What if I have to do it over?”

And I looked at this gangly young man with long, honey-colored hair falling into his eyes, unfolded across the bed, distraught. In a morning conversation with a friend, he learned that back home, the advanced history class had already finished seven chapters.

“I’ve only read three, and I can’t remember much of those.”

I reminded him he’d get extra tutoring when we returned for the holidays, although I, too, was dismayed by his memory problems, worse than I had realized. But I pointed out his accomplishments to date. In addition to U.S. studies and Constitution, he had picked up highlights in Canadian history and read an overview of its government. How many American kids his age could say that?

And so far we had read about ten novels and biographies. Plus, he was writing regularly. And picking up geography and culture as we drove along: Great Lake shipping, Metis. Voyageurs. Immigration in Canada.

I was very satisfied with his work.

Ryan wasn’t. But while I raged through the hotel, he devised a solution. Could he take a formal extension course in history, through the University of Missouri, as he was already doing with trig?

“Then, no one can doubt I’ve done the work.”

I hadn’t realized he nursed such anxiety, but there it was. Out of necessity, seat-of-the-pants learning would give way to more structure.

“If that’s what it takes for you to enjoy the year, sign up.”

He stretched, then. The gleam danced back into his eye. Once again he was the uncontaminated child, mischievous, insightful beyond his years.

“I think we’re having trouble because we’re traveling together for eight months,” he reasoned, philosophically, sweeping away all blame. “These fights are probably normal.”

Then we went out to explore the city.

In daylight, Old Quebec pulls you, unresisting, back to the predictable elegance of French taste and art and the likewise predictable historical hostility with the English. At night, this city set on a promontory defies imagination.

The following evening, our last night here, we climbed the staircase into the Upper City to enter another century and realm. Then we stood stock still, mesmerized.

Before us, steeped in lamps’ radiance, these streets exhibited charms unremarked in the sun. Light licked the turrets of the Chateau Frontenac to pierce a velvet sky. And the great city walls—the only such ones in North America— loomed and swayed in a glow soft as candlelight, while shadows rose powerful as predators, guarding the past.

Enchanted and mostly silent so as not to break the spell, in air chilled like French champagne, we strolled for an hour, then a second, drinking it all in. Waves slapped the banks of the St. Lawrence, each a cup holding light, offerings from barge and distant shore. Looking across the waters at a tug floating east, we traded opinions about the lone woman putting the illuminated galley to rights. Ryan thought she must be bored.

Content, I thought.

Honestly, would we trade all this for an ordinary year?

Not a chance!

It was well past one, but people still milled about along the Grande Allee, like us unwilling to retire.

Suddenly, Ryan, King-of-Cool Ryan, threw up his arms to embrace everything: shimmering lights, ancient walls, layered centuries, the crystalline stars. Dervishly, letting it all rip, he twirled, hopped from sidewalk into street and back again.

“I will never forget this night,” he crooned. “Never, as long as I live.”

My own heart somersaulted and bounced, because I loved to see him so. Because even with our arguments and rough edges, we were on to something. This was an outrageous freedom, and we both knew it.

Finally, because it was really late and the cold plucked at our bones, we walked back to our hotel. But we did so with arms around each other’s waist in mutual conspiracy, 17 a colleague of 60. For moments such as this, we had stepped away from the familiar and the loved, driven endlessly, endured each other’s quirks, pretended we knew what we were doing.

Whether this moment was in or out of time, it rocked our souls. A moment is just that. Bliss has a short shelf-life.

Tomorrow we might be back at it, taunting, losing stuff.

But, tonight, there was only Magic. And we both had the decency to be amazed.

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