Yoder & Sons: Geometry lessons and columns intrude Biology in Mombasa, deadlines in Djibouti; work harasses Steve and Lev

By Stephen Kreider Yoder and Levi Yoder

DJIBOUTI CITY, Djibouti — STEVE: Levi’s trying to do his geometry in Djibouti, but the math isn’t working out.

We’re sitting in the Proxy Cyber Café on Rue d’Ethiopie in this former-French-colony capital. I peek over Levi’s shoulder and see he’s on the same online geometry lesson he was struggling with last time I looked — something on proving stuff about arcs, I think.

He should be much further along, this far into winter term.

“Making any progress?” I ask in my best sympathetic-parent voice. “Go away, Dad,” Levi responds, and I turn back to my terminal to stare at my own past-due project: this column.

We’d rather be walking the colorful colonial streets here with their mix of old European architecture, Arabic atmosphere and African color. We’d prefer to be chilling in cafes over coffee and juice — not over work — and to be planning our next adventure, an overland leg across the border into the arid Afar-tribes region of Ethiopia.

Steve and Levi’s travels in East Africa

But Levi is skipping school to take this trip. One condition was that he complete his core courses online from the road. And I’ve agreed to write this column with him to give readers a window into our experience in the world we’re discovering.

I look over again. Levi has snuck onto Facebook now.

“Levi!” I say in my concerned-parent voice. “Stick to your work; we’re paying a lot to be here so you can get it done.”

LEVI: When I first tried out the online schooling program at home, it seemed like a cinch. But as I’ve gotten further into the lessons it’s gotten much harder than I expected.

After a few months of my online school, I’ve really noticed how much teachers helped me learn. Math is especially hard for me now that I don’t have a teacher to explain complicated theories. And Dad has been little help: It seems like he never remembers anything from his high-school math years.

Our original plan for doing my homework on this trip was that we’d frequently stop by Internet cafes and get work done. It has not been that simple. Internet cafes are not as easy to find as they have been in other countries we’ve traveled in before, and the ones we do find are almost always too slow to get much done on my online school.

In Mombasa, Kenya, I couldn’t keep a biology lesson loaded because the Internet only worked in five-minute increments. Often the computers are so outdated the website will not even work. In Harar, Ethiopia, the Web café server wouldn’t save the answers to my world-history lesson questions.

YODER & SONS

Stephen Kreider Yoder

Follow Steve Yoder, Wall Street Journal's S.F. bureau chief, and his 15-year-old son Levi (above) on a six-month journey through Africa as they trace the paths of early human migration. Read all the columns here.

Geometry lessons
and columns intrude
Steve and Levi come face to face with deadlines while on the road as they grapple with outdated computers, uncertain Internet access and lack of motivation. They’d rather be touring the Rift Valley.
• Somaliland extends warm welcome
• Trains, not planes or automobiles
• Lure of Zanzibar adds another detour
• Technology ruins travel, or does it?
• The sanctity, or not, of schedules
• Visit to world’s newest country

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Another problem: I am given a choice of which lessons I want to do. So, of course, I choose the class that is fun or more interesting for me. Right now I am 95% through history and 7% through geometry. Without someone to force me to do the harder classes, I naturally will put them off.

And since we are in such interesting places, the consequence of not doing my homework is having fun learning about the culture, or seeing fascinating landscapes. We just got back from a two-day trip, camping near the limestone chimneys at Djibouti’s Lac Abbe and walking along the saltiest lake in the world, Lac Assal; that kind of real-life geology lesson makes trying to study mundane topics at a PC screen like this one almost unbearable afterwards.

Still, I have 3 months to catch up and I’m learning much more than I normally would just by traveling, so I don’t have much to grumble about.

STEVE: It seemed so easy before we left California: Levi would do just a few hours a day of homework. We could do the same with the column. We’d spend the rest of our time learning rich lessons from the countries and cultures and people on the roadContinued