Once upon a time, a long, long time ago (all right, eleven years) I gave birth to my first son. Shortly thereafter he gained a sibling, and then another. By the time our family was complete, my husband and I had two boys and a girl, and I realized their learning styles were all significantly different. I also realized that of the three of them, only one would readily acclimate to public school. Rather than enrolling my children into a school system where they would not thrive, I chose to homeschool them. By far, this has been my most rewarding undertaking to date.
Fast forward four years. Leigh, our youngest, is not old enough for school yet. I am enrolled in our local college’s newest Bachelor’s teaching program. I work around my children’s schedules by homeschooling them in between studying. They learn a LOT about science, and I learn a lot about teaching science.
Fast forward one final time and we are in the present. Leigh is 7, Steven is 9, and Joey is 10. I am in the last semester of my Bachelor’s program, which requires an entire semester of student teaching. My most recent placement was in a rural school with a small population. The school was unremarkable save one important factor: it was a K-12 school. The students were charming and much kinder to each other than in many of the other schools I had the opportunity to visit. While the distance from my house was daunting (it was close to an hour’s drive and my driving skills are mediocre at best), I decided to grab the bull by the horns and ask to be placed there. For the entire semester. My reason? With Joey, Steven and
Leigh never in a public school, I felt it more beneficial to place them in a school where I could access them – or their teachers – any time during the day. And, with the atmosphere being so family oriented, I knew they would have a better chance of succeeding.
When you homeschool your children, you have myriad options not open to the public school system. I can begin at 6am and be finished four hours later. I can begin at 6pm instead. I can give entire lessons from the comfort of my bed while wearing jammies. Something is lacking, though, when students learn at home. They have no idea it is not polite to burp in front of their peers. Other body noises also invite fits of giggles. They use the restroom whenever they feel like it and eat when they are hungry. We had a whole summer of lessons this year that most other families do not even consider. When August rolled around, however, we were on track and ready to begin!
Before you are placed in the school system from a homeschooled environment, you must be tested. One of the reasons I chose to homeschool my children was less structure and stress. I had no idea how they would handle a placement test since most of their assessment had previously been formative. Joey’s reaction after he finished the three hour test? “That was fun! Wait until I tell Steven!” Of the three, Joey and Leigh placed a grade ahead of their biological age (Steven was quite close) and all three entered their classes accordingly: Leigh in third, Steven in fourth and Joey in sixth. About ten days after the school year began, I received a harried call from the school’s guidance office. Apparently they had not had homeschooled students place in grades ahead of their biological ages before. This was my first experience with homeschooling bringing forth negative connotations from the public school system. I was under the impression that parents homeschooled because they thought it would benefit their children and enhance their performance as individuals – to make them better people. I learned later that many teachers flinch when they learn a homeschooled student will be entering their classroom. Generally these students are behind the curve and require more maintenance than a typical student. But I digress…our guidance counselor asked if we could please place Leigh in second grade with the rest of the 7-year-olds and Joey in fifth grade with the other 10-year-olds. I capitulated with Leigh, but obstinately refused to

place her unless she could begin speech therapy. They were more than happy to accommodate my request. Joey, however, was another story. He had been placed in advanced 6 th grade classes and moving him back to 5 th grade would be a debacle. I stood my ground and Joey was forced to take the 7 th grade placement test after he had previously aced the 6 th grade placement test. He took the test. He passed. He could have been placed in 7 th . I am not sure what they were trying to prove, but I believe it backfired.
Joey remained in 6 th grade advanced. As an aside, if you want to motivate the 7 th grade students you are teaching into trying harder, sometimes your motivation comes not from your teaching, but from your offspring. I had a few struggling students who were absolutely shocked that a 10-year-old was placed in one or more of their classes, and they were 13! When they realized Joey would be exiting the school system an entire year early, they honestly stepped it up to see if they too could master that feat.
Once our preliminary placement issues were overcome, our next obstacle was housing. As stated previously, driving ranks low on my list of fun things to do, and being on the road infuriates me. We had an option, though. We had a 40 foot option, as a matter of fact. Last summer my husband bought a converted Greyhound bus. Although his initial reaction was “It’s perfect!” within a week he began tearing out wiring and niceties the original owner thought were enormously necessary. We were left with a structurally sound bus lacking cable television, stairs with gaping holes along one side, a few other holes hither and yon, and very thin insulation. I felt pioneery, though. I knew I could make this work.
Next up: where do we park the bus? As fate would have it, we have a friend with 70 acres of land within four miles of the school. He agreed to let us use his land as our home base for the next five months. Not only was he accommodating with his land, he was equally accommodating with his electricity. He had the local power company erect a power pole where the bus would be situated so we would have our own source of electricity. Now we were really making progress!
The week after school began, the bus was in place with both air conditioners purring softly to keep the poorly insulated 320 square feet a pleasant temperature. And this is where our story begins in earnest.
Living On the Edge – of Civilization
While you are sitting there sipping your coffee in your cozy office or in your home, look around you. If you can reach your arms to the left and to the right without encountering a wall or a cabinet, you are indeed fortunate. This is a trick you will not perform when you are living in a vehicle 40’ long and 8’ across. Every space is maximized, and most of the maximization involves bedding. Our venture did not include my husband, who tended our house (and cats – he looooooves cats, just ask him) so we were four small people living in a bus with one bed, a fold-out couch, and just enough room for someone to sleep partially in the living room with some body parts draped into the kitchen. My first reaction was “We do not have enough space for beds!” while my children’s reactions were “I don’t WANT to sleep on the couch! I want to sleep on the floor!” Well, that solved that problem. For a while. Remember how I mentioned the air conditioners? Right.
We live in Florida. Florida is not known for its pleasant summer climate. Florida is the grand champion of humidity. August is not a cheery month in Florida anyway. The temperature ranges from suffocating to boiling. Remember the issue about the poor insulation? Yes, that figures into this story as well.
Imagine if you will…

Two weeks into our venture all is running smoothly. We have most of our belongings unpacked and organized, and sleeping arrangements have become two bodies on the floor, one on the couch, and me in the bed. The struggle to see which child will be forced to sleep on the couch is still a hot topic. Well, everything is hot. It is August in Florida, after all. You probably know what is going to happen next, right? Yes, the air conditioner. It started dripping. I called my darling husband and asked if it was unusual for the air conditioner to leak. He said no, it is probably due to the unbelievable heat outside. I respond cheerfully and hang up. A few hours later I call him again. “How much water is typical?” I ask as I count drops splattering on the carpet beneath. He suggests turning the air conditioner off and letting it rest for a while. It is smoldering in the front half of the bus, but the back air conditioner is just fine, so we hang out in approximately 160 square feet and try not to cook, which heats the air considerably. Not cooking means not eating, though, and three children eating cold cereal is not the happiest of situations. I learn to make meals as quickly as possible while the children are outside working on homework where it is cooler by the lake in the shade of the over-reaching forest. Most meal preparation is followed quickly by a shower.
Within two more weeks we have another incident. You are probably guessing this small situation already, I am sure. One air conditioner for the entire bus just wears the poor thing out. Soon I was desperately twisting dials on either air conditioner, trying to coax just half a degree of cooler temperature into the bus. During the non-school part of the daylight hours it was not much of an issue since I was working on landscaping our environment and the children were romping around 70 acres of playground, jumping on our trampoline and dangling limbs into the lake. Night time was miserable, though. Every night I faced a major dilemma: did I close the windows and struggle with the air conditioner, or did I let
Mother Nature cool the bus interior while her charming darlings the cockroaches crept inside and crawled across all the surfaces? I opted for the heat. Every time. We took a lot of showers. Which led to our second problem: the amount of water used in the bus.
Water, Water…Nowhere?
When you take a shower at home, you turn on the water, wait for it to warm up, wash, rinse, and dry. On a bus, you realize a few hours beforehand that you will need a shower and turn on the water heater at that time, postponing the shower considerably by forgetting at intervals that the hot water heater is still not on.
This leads to stinky bodies or cold showers. Generally the cold showers won because the length of a bus shower spans approximately five minutes, tops, and you can endure cold water for five minutes. I guarantee it. Especially when it is a few degrees below the boiling point of water outside. The shower routine consisted of turning water on long enough to wet hair and body, turn water off, lather, turn water on, rinse, turn water off, dry. As if we did not have a significant water situation already, we had a water pressure issue. Watching the water groan out of the nozzle was like watching a heart pump blood: it erupted in spurts and fits. This was not the most comfortable setting for showers, but we made it work.
For a few months. And then one day no water emitted from the faucet and we learned to miss our previous unsteady supply. Another phone call to my supportive spouse was in order.
When your water tank holds a scant 40 gallons, you learn to use water sparingly. I conserved water while living in a home without wheels, but I was not nearly as diligent as I was in the bus. We learned that one tank of water (40 gallons) would last us almost a month since we drank water brought from our house.
When the tank was low on water, the pump would groan a bit more excessively and the heartbeat was a

bit more flaccid. I learned this was a sign to bound outside and hook up a special water hose and filter to our proprietor’s outside water faucet to pump more water into the water tank. The third time I tried this trick, however, the pump was not nearly as robust. I called my darling husband to ask for guidance; his answer? Go outside with a metal tool and whack the pump a few times. Sure enough, the water started pumping more happily through the faucet. This maneuver led him to determine that he needed a new pump. In the interim, we discovered that turning on the kitchen faucet would make the shower work.
Nobody could explain the logic behind it, but we were more presentable when we figured it out.
The bus was equipped with four place settings. We were four people. That meant I learned to wash dishes after every meal. Washing dishes ranks just slightly below driving in my life. In the beginning of our bus life, I slacked a few times, but I learned my lesson rather quickly. How, you ask? That leads to our next escapade: pets.
Can We Have a Cat?
The bus was drafty, to say the least. Quarter-sized gaps permeated the steps leading to the front of the bus and were present in a few other locations throughout. It was not a concern at the beginning of our stay, but became the reason we retired this bus for our second bus. Was it because it was letting in too much hot air? No. Too much cold air was creeping in during the colder months? No. Pets? Yes.
One weekend we loaded a large, plastic container with a week’s supply of freshly laundered clothes and packaged food to transport to the bus. Because we were in a hurry, the open container was not distributed to cabinets or closets, but remained at the front of the bus until we arrived from school Monday afternoon.
Since leaving supplies the Sunday before we arrived was not an unusual occurrence, nobody thought twice. Unfortunately, the mice were thrilled with our choice of bagged and canister snacks. Most of our food stock had small bites nibbled away. I searched frantically through the clothes to verify that nothing had been chewed through, but, apparently our mice had no inclination to nest and had no moth friends.
The discovery of mice led to an all-out effort to protect the food. EVERYTHING went into the refrigerator. Granola bars stacked neatly in the drawers (no evidence of mice in the drawers) were nonetheless shoveled into the refrigerator’s bottom shelf. Any opened bag of cereal or nuts or Goldfish was immediately refrigerated after the snack was finished. Nobody was allowed to eat anywhere in the bus except the table. Most meals and snacks were eaten outside on patio furniture. We spent the long, sultry afternoons of summer in the shade of the forest, eating crumbly snacks while finishing up homework. We tried in vain to starve the mice, and they were indeed hungry. How could we tell? Easy.
Before bed it is my habit to eat a snack. My metabolism runs high throughout the day because I exercise frequently, and no snack before bed generally forces me to awaken at 3am with intense grumblings from my stomach. At home, I would eat an apple and toss the core into the bathroom to retrieve the following morning, roll the top of the bag containing the snack I had consumed and let the bag fall to the floor beside the bed, or simply eat a chocolate chip cookie and lick the remnants of gooey chocolate chips from my fingers. In the bus, I would make sure every last crumb was disposed of properly and place apple cores or leftover snacks into the refrigerator. I knew the mice were hungry, and I was vigilant in my effort to starve them out of the bus. It never occurred to me about the cookies, however, until one night when I awoke from a vivid dream that I was being shocked in my hand. That same night I rolled over and hit the same hand on the head of a nail. I was slightly more cognizant and thought to myself that I had to find that nail and remove it. The third time I woke in shock to realize that I had not hit my finger on a

screw and my dream of the shock was not a dream. No, it had been a mouse nibbling on my fingers to remove the remnants of cookie that I had merely cleaned by licking my fingers. Instinctively I thanked
God that the mouse had nibbled on me and not one of my children. After that night I made sure we all washed our hands very thoroughly before going to bed. But that was not the end of the mouse.
One bright morning I woke early, as usual, to work out. As I slogged from the bedroom to the kitchen to make my post-workout breakfast, I caught a mouse off guard. He was trapped in the small crevice between the wall and the counter, and every time he peeked out his head, I would lunge toward him to scare him back. After four lunges, I shot quickly in the other direction to grab my camera. After all, he was cute. The mouse took this opportunity to dart lickety-split into my bedroom, where he discovered he did not want to be, so he dashed quickly in the opposite direction while I opened the refrigerator, barely missing colliding with my foot along the way. After a leisurely 30 minute breakfast I opened the refrigerator to see a pair of glassy black eyes peering back at me. I immediately shut the refrigerator door and considered my options. I thought leaving the mouse inside the refrigerator would eventually chill him to death, but, in the meantime, he was likely to nibble small holes in everything on the bottom shelf.
I steeled myself, opened the door, and played hide and seek with my furry felon. After a tense thirty seconds, I managed to smack the mouse out of the refrigerator. He dodged across the floor and disappeared for a long while.
Joey, Steven and Leigh thought the mice (plural) were adorable. At night, when the weather was a little cooler, we would sit in the bus and complete our homework assignments. Joey would position himself at the table with an array of pencils at his left hand. He would use one pencil to work through his math and literature, and the remainder of his collection was used to lob at the mice as the skittered from behind the passenger side captain’s chair to the pedestal of the steering wheel. His goal was not to actually hit the mice (remember, they thought they were adorable), but to scare them and see how high they would jump.
Joey would crow with delight when a mouse would launch itself particularly high off the ground. It was far better than television, he told me.
By this time, I had a lot of friends and family members asking why in the world I would remain in such an environment. Well, it was because of the closeness…the togetherness…the learning experiences.
Take, for instance, the interesting fact I learned about the diet of mice. This one small fact made me love my little furry pets.
One night I opened the medicine cabinet and, to my utter horror, discovered a cockroach roaming along my toothbrushes and hairspray. My first instinct was to disinfect everything, but I knew I had to go for the source. I grabbed the first spray can I could find – hairspray – and tried in vain to freeze the roach in place. When this failed, I resorted to bug spray. This worked much more quickly and the roach was belly up in a few minutes on the left side of the sink. Left side. Between the sink and shower. Left side. The next day it was in the same place. I was planning on moving the ugly thing since it was disgusting, but my opportune bug-moving moments happened to coincide with my children’s sleeping-haphazardlyacross-the-floor time, and I was afraid I would drop the roach onto one of them. Ewwwww. So the roach stayed on the left side of the sink. The next day I searched out the roach. On the left side of the sink. It was gone. Now where exactly does a dead roach wander off to, you ask? I found incriminating evidence the next day in a secluded location. It seems roaches are tasty, if you are a mouse. Yum yum. Suddenly
I am not so upset with the mice.

Rob gave us some mouse killer that was safe for use around children. We bought mouse traps, which I set outside the bus atop the tires. After the roach incident we went to Disney World. Truly, though, my heart was not in it. I never used the mouse killer and no mice were injured in the traps. I could forgive any creature that ate roaches. Until our last pet arrived and I realized mice were not the top of the food chain.
My darling husband arrived to assess the previously mentioned lack-of-water situation and install a new pump. He could not begin his task immediately, however, because a lovely, 6’ long, unidentified variety of snake was sunning itself directly in front of the bay door housing the broken water pump. Noises and movement were apparently not aggravating to the snake, so we found a long stick and draped the snake upon it, dropping it (well, the snake slithered off on its own as well) quite a few times before reaching the underbrush where the snake finally glided off peacefully. I told Rob about the snake. He said it was unusual for snakes to travel alone. It never occurred to me that this would be foreshadowing.
The following week I was outside working on the yard when Steven ran up to me excitedly explaining my immediate need to look in the bus. I paused and asked him what would be so interesting that it could not wait a minute. He said, “We have a cute little snake in the bus!” One more pause from me. “IN the bus???”, I asked disbelievingly. Steven nodded his head vigorously and bounced back to the bus, with me close on his heels. We opened the door and Steven pointed to the radiator. A small, lizard-like head protruded from the floor of the radiator. Well great. Just what I need. A snake in the bus. How could I sleep not knowing whether it was venomous or non-venomous when I had three lunch-sized children sleeping on the floor? Since I was not in the habit of reaching into radiators to remove reptiles, I decided to hope for the best. I continued with my yard work and, sure enough, within ten minutes my bus spy, disguised as a 9-year-old, reported that the snake was in the kitchen. I dropped everything and rushed to the bus, hoping to catch the snake in the open. Once, about a decade ago, I turned on the bathroom light in my house to find a rat eyeing me warily. Reaction took over and I trapped him under a wicker trashcan. The same thing happened with the snake. Reflexes made me slip a throw rug under him (God bless the designer of throw rugs!) and shovel him into the counters until he slid toward the center of the rug. I quickly and mechanically folded the rug package-like and bolted outside, once more to the edge of the clearing. As I released the snake, I realized I was the leader of a parade of small Shonks. Joey,
Steven, and Leigh gathered around the snake and remarked on his beauty and size. I knew the next question would concern touching the snake I had tried so hard to keep them from coming into contact with, so I hollered in my loudest mom voice for them to back off and leave the snake alone. They were correct in their assessment of its beauty; he would have made a lovely pair of boots.
After our snake incident, I shared my experience with friends and family. The responses were strikingly similar: Did you look at it? You know poisonous snakes have heads shaped like spades and nonpoisonous snakes have… I would interrupt the dialogue with a smile and explain that in my haste to remove the snake from the bus, I did not take the time to notice the size and position of the snake’s head, or any other parts of its anatomy that would determine whether it was venomous or not.
At this point I became desperate and began announcing at the beginning of each of my classes that I was looking for a cat who was a good mouser. One of my students recommended a boy in my 1 st period class, explaining that he had “dozens of cats”. Well, he did. And , even better, he was more than happy to share. He even had his cats categorized! Inside or out? Male or female? Mouser or snake catcher?

Adult or kitten? When the questioning was finished, he had whittled his menagerie to a scant three or four felines he would recommend. I called his mom and asked if we could come over to pick out a cat.
She told me to take several. Before the day of our meeting arrived, we had another fateful event.
Superbus To The Rescue!
As much as we longed for a cat, we had one more trick up our sleeves. Well, not quite up our sleeves – it was taking up quite a bit of room in our yard, actually. Keith had recently had our second bus (sigh) serviced and deemed roadworthy, so we thought exchanging buses would be a worthwhile endeavor. I told my cat owning student we were going to hold off on the cat adoption in lieu of bringing in reinforcements. After a Thanksgiving weekend of unpacking the entire contents of one bus and arranging them in the second bus, we hit the road and drove back to Summerville.
The second bus had new carpeting, which was extremely plush, and I had recently purchased a Kirby vacuum cleaner at a yard sale. I vacuumed every day to prevent any mouse intruders. That part was good. The unfinished walls in the back bedroom gave Steven the willies, though and he refused to listen to me read Harry Potter in the back bedroom, insisting it must be read on his bed, where the insulation was not exposed. I vacuumed vigilantly, washed dishes and cleaned the sink after every meal, and the mice have yet to return.
And this leads us to the conclusion of my student teaching experience. The last two weeks in the new bus have been blissfully uneventful. Well, except when it rains and we have to place towels and trash cans in strategic locations and move the air mattresses away from the walls. I will take damp walls over malfunctioning air conditioners, lack of water, roaches, mice, and snakes any day of the week. Joey woke one morning, smiled, and remarked that he thought he was in a luxury cabin in his dream before he realized his eyes were open and he was in the bus. My children are in school one more week, and, although it is below freezing outside, it is rather toasty inside this bus with my two pint-sized electric heaters. Mind you, I am wearing a heavy jacket, but my nose is warm and my fingers are nimble enough to type. Life is grand. And now we have to go home? p.s. Did I mention the poison ivy? Please be sure to learn to recognize poison ivy if you are going to be on unfamiliar property. The results are excruciatingly unpleasant if you fail to notice it in your vicinity.
Ugh.