Same Old Same Old

What happens to Everywhere School when everywhere is back home in Montreal? Suddenly our hometown feels as small as a classroom, boxed in, the same ol’ same ol’. When not so long ago having a day out of class was exciting, now it’s just, well, Montreal.

Not that we’ve been sitting around, sadly reminiscing about the trip that was and the now that is. We’ve walked, we’ve looked at old neighborhoods in a new way, found new neighborhoods, checked out the local farmers’ markets to see how they compared. We’ve taken the metro and rejected our car in favor of traveling like a tourist. We tried to hold on to this new perspective, this new way of seeing our hometown. We’ve looked and seen….but less and less every day as everything began to look like, well, the usual. Weather, which wasn’t allowed to get in our way as we traveled, now seems like a huge obstacle and a great reason to not go out, not get wet or cold, just stay inside until summer comes….eventually….in a few months.

It’s hard to change or be changed when everything around you isn’t. We fall back to our same roles, same reactions, same attitudes. Very frustrating because, as much as I’d like to keep traveling where the rules and roles were different, traveling is not only expensive, but it gets tiring after a while (although I think we had a few more months in us before we would’ve gotten tired). This is not to say that I don’t have projects that I find interesting, challenging – I do. But I’m not sure if Madison is equally as engaged in what she’s working on. While traveling she was  interested in places we visited, she could find things laugh-out-loud funny, or exciting, or impressive. But back on her home turf, where being indifferent is cool, its been way more of a challenge to sustain a positive interest in anything that remotely hints at educational. She has found a few focus areas, and we found a book about math that she finds not only helpful, but enjoyable (a word she hasn’t thought to apply to math since about grade 5), but the enthusiasm seems decidedly diminished.

Perhaps  this is more the norm and what we experienced traveling was the anomaly, but I miss it. It was like a 2-month adrenalin rush of learning and now we’re back to normal, and I’m going through withdrawal.

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