Hi, I’m Miles Canington. I am 14 years old and going into 9th grade. This is my first blog post, so I hope you enjoy it.

This year, 2020, I was supposed to go back to a 5 day a week school. For the past year and a half, I have been homeschooled by my mom and through an online education platform. I really enjoyed this, but like everything, there are pros and cons.

One of the things I really liked about homeschooling was the self-paced aspect and being able to go anywhere while still being able to manage my schoolwork. This allowed me to wake up when I wanted to and do my work when I was most productive. Something else that I love about homeschooling is that I get to be with my family a whole lot more. Now, sometimes that can be frustrating, but it allows you to bond with your family in a way that you couldn’t if you went to school.

A few things I didn’t like about homeschooling were the lack of community and the lack of face-to-face interaction with my friends and teachers on a daily basis. When I first started homeschooling, I was excited for something new but disappointed at the same time that I couldn’t see my friends and hang out with people that I knew well.

At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, my parents chose to help a friend’s family member relocate from NYC, and we moved to another part of town where we had another house with more land. This kind of took away the possibility of me going back to the school that I went to before Covid hit. However, this also opened up another opportunity.

Some good friends of mine that I have grown up with recommended that I look at their school since it was close by. My parents looked into it and thought we could make it work. When I heard this, I was really excited. I had already done a few tours of the school, so I was ready. But then, Covid-19 changed those plans.

There was still a chance of going to the school, but Covid was slowly eliminating that opportunity. There were many events that started the downhill slide to not being able to go to the school. I was slowly losing hope. About two weeks later, my family decided not to send me there. The reason for this was because we didn’t know if the school would close down due to Covid a week into the school year, and we would go completely online. This wouldn’t have been an issue, but we didn’t want to pay a lot of money for a private school just to go online.

After a lot of discussions, we decided to go with online public school. I am fine with it, but I am just disappointed that I can’t go to the school that I was so excited for.

But my dad had a plan. He thought that since I would be in school on a laptop, we could make the most of it. A few weeks later, he went and bought an RV, came up with the plan of traveling the world, and homeschooling along the way. So, we are getting everything in place. We have the RV fitted up with everything we need, besides food, and we just need to find the time and place to go.

I believe that this will work. I believe that this will help our family become closer and teach us how to adjust when we get thrown a curveball.

I am very excited about where we are going and I hope to see you along the way.