Home School at 32,000 Feet

Ahhhh…. Sipping a nice drink over the Pacific, and pushing the recline button down! Once the wheels leave the ground, there’s nothing more you can do. All of the critical things were taken care of (hopefully!), and the items of lesser importance faded from the to-do lists. Now we’re en route! Yahhhoooooo!

The kids are thrilled with the tiny little dinners, and want to save every special plastic fork and stirring stick. Each seat now has it’s own personal video screen with controller, so there is no need to talk, read, or interact with anyone…. You can just plug in and surf channels in your own earphone world. We made sure they took advantange of the views outside the window, but once we were over the open ocean, a movie seemed just fine. Between each movie, however, we did some math and writing homeschool lessons.

Everyone but Eliza had their workbooks in their carryon, so she got “real math” problems. She used the onboard flight data to calculate all the conversion ratios; miles vs. kms, feet vs. meters, celsius vs. fahrenheit. She had to estimate how long it would take to various destinations, and determine our altitude reletive to home, Half Dome & Mt. Everest. She’s also been my personal exchange rate calculator, figuring out the value of noodles in Hong Kong dollars, and dosas in Indian Rupees… She wasn’t that interested until I showed her the bill at the HK airport for 3 juices and a coffee – HK$106! Egads, a hundred bucks for a few drinks??? That got her hooked on finding the “real” value in US$’s. (…about $13)