An hour ago, Colt was leaning over the side of a Zodiac boat in Icy Bay, Alaska, lowering a Niskin bottle into glacier-fed water.
“The things we’re gonna be looking for are salinity, clarity, temperature, depth,” he told me as he collected a sample. “We’re also going to be looking at levels of chlorophyll and plankton.”
Before heading back to our main expedition ship, he also helped run a Secchi disk test, tow a pair of plankton nets, and haul chunks of floating ice aboard for the ship’s science team to examine — all part of collecting data for a citizen-science project for NOAA.
Colt is my 14-year-old son. For our family, this is the latest destination in six years of global travel. For him, it’s also school.
In 2020, our family began combining school and travel — and Colt has kept this arrangement going
In early 2020, all three of my children were attending school remotely, same as just about every American kid.
But somewhere in that first year of online learning, my wife and I had a realization: If school was going to be experienced on a laptop anyway, the laptops might as well travel.
So we started choosing destinations that could be incorporated into the curriculum. We explored the ruins of Chichén Itzá instead of reading a chapter on Mayan history. Jungle and wildlife treks replaced biology worksheets. Instead of opening textbooks, we booked museum and architecture tours around the world.
That stopgap became a lifestyle: six years of constant travel through more than 30 countries across all seven continents.
When classrooms reopened in the fall of 2021, our kids got to decide if they wanted to keep traveling or head home. Our oldest daughter went back to in-person learning. Our middle daughter followed in 2025.
Colt looked at the same options — a good school four blocks from our Denver home, the same one his sisters chose, or his passport — and picked the latter. He’s chosen it every semester since.
His education became a mix of “worldschooling” on the road through travel and formal schooling online.
The online half hasn’t always been a slam dunk. We went through two state-sanctioned schools before landing on a private academy with a fully accredited K-12 program that felt like a good fit. That accreditation matters to us since it helps keep every door to higher education open.
It has nearly the same curriculum as in-person school — math, literature, even science experiments — minus the standardized state exams.
The real difference is when the work happens, not whether it does. Assignment deadlines are flexible, and as long as everything is completed within the semester, credit is credit.
So Colt works ahead whenever he knows we’re about to lose connectivity — which is exactly how these 10 a.m. Zodiacs don’t cost him a grade.
The only thing the virtual academy can’t offer is P.E., and between his trick-scooter crew, hikes, and swim days, Colt covers that with about six hours of activity a day.
World travel has taught him things that a classroom could not
By 11, Colt was our family’s designated airport navigator. We’d land at Singapore’s Changi or Tokyo’s Narita with a tight connection, and he’d ask to lead us gate-to-gate — usually across multiple concourses.
That same year, he started his own YouTube channel, concepting his own episodes and arranging his own collaborations. He earned almost 5,000 subscribers in his first three months.
When his oldest sister visited the Philippines for the first time, it was Colt who gave her and her boyfriend a full city tour of his favorite haunts.
In Hong Kong last winter, he wanted a silver chain necklace. He researched the best outdoor markets, mapped his route, and negotiated with vendors until he got his price.
He’s also the child who will try any street food put in front of him: day-old chicks in Manila, horse sashimi in Kyoto, fried scorpions in Bangkok.
Here’s the part that surprises people most: The travel didn’t make him flighty. It made him an operator.
Six years of navigating unfamiliar places has convinced him he can just … figure things out. So he does — at home as much as abroad.
Although we travel regularly, we’re not perpetually overseas. Since settling back in Denver in 2025, our two-week trips have dropped to about once every other month, with regular life in between.
And regular life is where his operator side really shows.
Colt runs a small reptile-breeding operation out of his bedroom — five terrariums of geckos with automated heating, misting, and incubation systems that keep everything alive while we’re on the road.
But the geckos are just inventory; the business is service.
He finds neighborhood kids who want one, builds a care plan, shops with their parents for gear, sets up the habitat, trains the family, then checks in for months afterward. He also pet-sits geckos for his clients (his word, not mine).
When his breeding pair outproduced his client list, he cold-called local reptile shops until they agreed to buy his hatchlings.
And when he’s not moving geckos, he’s selling crafts and knocking on doors, offering to do odd jobs for neighbors to fund new scooter parts.
Last fall, he added Little Guy Lawncare to the portfolio, a neighborhood leaf-removal service complete with printed business cards. He launched it with a $150 loan from us that he paid off in his first week.
Nobody assigned any of this.
I’m unsure what my son’s future holds, but I’m confident he’ll get where he wants to be
Worldschooling comes in many forms. It isn’t a fit for every family, and it can come with real costs; I won’t pretend otherwise.
In Colt’s case, the main drawback is that we don’t run into many children his age on our trips because we often travel while most of them are in school. That’s no issue mid-hike or mid-dive, but on days at sea and long travel days, Colt gets bored and misses his geckos and his Denver friends.
Still, every semester, the school four blocks away is right there. Every semester, he weighs his options and chooses this life instead.
Since he skipped a grade, Colt is on track to graduate from high school at 16 and is hungry for more education, just not four years at a traditional American university. He’s already eyeing an internship at the late Steve Irwin’s Australia Zoo, and his endgame is a reptile rescue and breeding center of his own.
All three of our kids are intelligent, kind, and talented — his sisters are thriving on more traditional paths, and I have zero doubt about their futures. Colt is just wired differently. Six years of world schooling did that, and somewhere along the way, it rewired my definition of “prepared,” too.
I can’t tell you which country my son will be standing in at 22, but I know he’ll have gotten himself there — gate-to-gate, on his own itinerary — and that he’ll be completely fine.
Read the full article here
