Virtual learning allows families opportunity to travel during school year
By Brian Miller
If there is a positive to all the virtual learning across the country, it’s easier to travel.
Family travel is a great way to spend time together but it is a lot harder when you have school age children who can’t simply skip school to go to a theme park.
For many families, summer is the only time to take a much needed vacation and that too gets a lot harder to do as some states and school districts transition to year round calendars. From the months of November to January, schools start to let out for the holiday seasons and that has become the winter hot bed for travel.
That is not the case in this unusual and unprecedented pandemic era.
Now families don’t need to stay home. When mom or dad get that vacation, they are not stuck at home doing chores for a week while their kids are sitting in class. Virtual classrooms are allowing families to leave their homes and travel while their kids are in school.
Earlier this year my wife got her October vacation all set and we packed up the kids, the luggage, the wifi hot spot adapter, and their school laptops and off we went. Instead of waking up and shuttling them off to the school, we woke them up, hooked them up, and let them do their classes from the comfort of a hotel room that looked out over Disney’s Magic Kingdom.
Later that week, the kids who had tests to do on Friday, we dropped them off at their grandfather’s house to end the school week and they were able to attend class and spend some nice time with Grandpa.
The point is we are all relatively stuck at home and while traveling may not be ideal right now we can still take advantage of some of the benefits of not being a traditional year. My kids will not return to a live face to face classroom this year and that’s o.k. with me, and my travel itinerary.