Brynlee and Cougan Smith concede that roadschooling can be tough. A virtual classroom on the open road is not for crybabies. “You should always have a good attitude, even when it’s, like, really hard and you keep, like, losing your connection when you turn in your math test, and then you have to redo the entire test,” Brynlee, who was relaxing at a campground near San Antonio, and who is nine years old, said the other day. Cougan, her brother, who is eleven, said that, above all, a roadschooler needs to be mature: “You should just think like you’re at home and not get distracted by the things out the window and not, like, show all your classmates a picture you took of a red fox.”
Roadschooling is a lot like remote schooling, except that students log on to classes not from their kitchens but from, say, the Great Smoky Mountains or the Petrified Forest. The strange school year has made this an attractive option. Mayor Bill de Blasio, after delaying most in-person classes for another week, predicted that working-class families wouldn’t mind the chaos. (“They are people who understand the realities of life,” he said.) Nevertheless, families are seeking alternatives, and some of them are hitting the road. R.V. dealers have months-long waiting lists. Campsites are offering after-school programming. Campspot, a campground-reservation company, has designed itineraries, with stops meant to supplement history or science lessons. (“Parents may think, I’m going to screw up my kids’ education!” Caleb Hartung, Campspot’s C.E.O., who was homeschooled, says. “But kids are pretty resilient.”)
This summer, Brynlee and Cougan’s parents sold their house, in Prescott, Arizona. Now the kids live in a thirty-six-foot-long R.V., along with a two-year-old sister, Della; two dogs, Cookie and Clyde; their dad, Ryan (an adventure guide); and their mom, Mattie (ditto, with a master’s in education). Mattie runs the family’s Instagram. If Brynlee and Cougan had Instagram accounts, their posts would show them studying outside the camper while, in the background, geysers erupt. But reality is less cool; the kids usually do class from the back seat of their family’s pickup truck as it tows the R.V. down the highway.
One morning, when no driving was required, classes were held outside. Cougan sat at a fishing pond wearing a muscle tee, his hair in a Mohawk. He had his laptop open and a line in the water. “It’s harder to do math in the truck, because you have to get out way more papers,” he said. “And when you have to do, like, science experiments—you can’t do those. Because you’re in a truck. You can’t drop stuff and record which lands first, because there’s probably gonna be something moving in the truck, like Della or the dogs.”
“Or me!” Brynlee said. She sat at a picnic table, waiting for her language-arts class to begin. A recent assignment was to write a diary from the perspective of a kid on the Lewis and Clark expedition. (First entry: “I didn’t really want to go but I needed to listen to my father.”) But the Internet wasn’t working. This is normal. Videoconferences fuzz out. The audio goes squirrelly. “It sounds like a robot chipmunk,” Brynlee said.
“Still waiting on Brynlee to tell me where she’s camping,” her teacher, at a public school back in Prescott, said brightly, when the service coöperated.
“Um, last night we went and saw the Alamo,” Brynlee said. They couldn’t go inside because of Covid. “But we did, like, a river walk down by there.”
“Super exciting!” the teacher said.
Brynlee likes roadschooling—she’s visited Mt. Rushmore and Yellowstone and gone kayaking and rock climbing—but if she were President, she said, classes would still be in person; everyone would wear masks and workers would be paid fairly. (Cougan’s plan involved targeted reopenings: “Only a certain amount of fun things, like laser tag or paintball or pools and playgrounds.”) The Smiths stuck with their local schools so that they could return if they chose to.
It was time to switch classes. “When do you need to get back on, hon?” Mattie asked Cougan.
“Six minutes ago,” he said. She herded him into the camper for a lesson on multiplying fractions. But Google Meet was frozen. “It’s just saying you’re loading forever!” he said. “You’re sitting on a computer all day. You’re gonna melt your brain before you learn anything.”
That evening, they settled down to do some art. Cougan was painting a rock and venting. “Like, it just kicked me off!” he said. “It said, ‘Can’t join this video meeting,’ ‘Page is unresponsive.’ Like, everything that could possibly go wrong.”
Brynlee was decorating a stick. “Yeah, but at least you caught a fish this morning,” she said.
“Oh, yeah,” Cougan said. “I did!” ♦
