When you think of a teaching career, the term “adventurous” doesn’t always come to mind — but that’s precisely how you’d describe Lisa and Jak Boston, both teachers and parents from the UK. In fact, thanks to their teaching careers, they’ve been able to live internationally for the past decade with their kids, including in Cyprus, South Korea, and Brunei.
They were on a five year teaching contract in Brunei when the pandemic struck.
“We couldn’t leave,” says Lisa about the ensuing lockdowns, “we felt a bit caged.”
When the lockdown lifted, the family decided to make a drastic lifestyle change. They left their teaching jobs, sold most of their belongings, and went all in on a nomadic lifestyle.
“The drive [to travel full time] is mostly due to post lockdown wanting to take the kids off and show them experiences beyond the classroom where they could learn and we could learn alongside them.”
How they do it
Usually, when people decide to travel full-time, they sell their house and use the proceeds to live on. However, after Jak’s dad died in 2021, they decided to use the inheritance to “act like grown-ups.” Before they started traveling, they bought a house in the UK.
“We’ve never had any sort of security before. We just plod along having fun, la-de-da,” says Lisa.
“But then there was an opportunity for us to act like grown-ups and provide a little bit of security. So we took the money from the inheritance and we bought a rental property. We’re not thinking about it. We’ll never see it. We never do anything with it. But that’s our emergency fund perhaps, which we never had before.”
The money they make from the rental provides a steady monthly income for the family — not enough to live on, but it helps to provide for ⅓ of their monthly budget, along with any income they make from freelance teaching jobs or through their blog. The majority of their monthly budget comes from savings. They also focus on traveling in cheaper regions, like Southeast Asia, to cut down on monthly spending.
“We set off knowing that we had X amount in the bank and that would last us six to eight months. But then we knew we needed to start working and create an income while we travel,” says Jak.
That’s when Lisa started taking on freelance teaching roles — mainly, grading papers online — and they recently launched their family blog which they are trying to monetize.
“I used to work in TV, production and now I’m into content creation,” says Jak, who is starting to use his skills to work with travel brands and sell digital products, as well as offering his travel knowledge to other families as a travel coach.
“We’re hoping that through travel and meeting all these people and testing out blogs and trying to be content creators, we’re going to land on this idea that’s going to turn into a business. And if it doesn’t, then we tried, and we can go back to international teaching and restock the bank balances for another couple of years. And I think that’s one of the beauties of teaching is that someone will always need international school, primary and secondary teachers.”
Worldschooling
Jak and Lisa teach their kids while traveling, but they both admit that they had to change their mindset when it comes to learning.
“You have to let go of the curriculum and [the idea] that they sit down and they do this lesson and then they do this lesson and then this lesson,” says Jak, “because it doesn’t really work…what actually works, when you’re not in school, is the complete opposite: child-led.”
“It’s all about well-placed questions that can actually draw out a lot of the learning rather than telling them stuff for them to remember. It’s letting go of what you know about a school day and flipping it around and letting the children direct the learning,” he says while also noting that he and his wife give their kids “learning pillars” and big ideas to think about without micromanaging.
“You have to let go of a lot of preconceived ideas about how learning happens. What was really noticeable was when the kids found something that they wanted to know about, there’s a spark and there’s energy and there’s a vibrancy to it,” says Lisa,
“Education is going to change massively, like with, A.I. and just how accessible knowledge is. You can get knowledge from anywhere. So, it’s not about knowledge anymore. It’s about skills and the curriculum systems don’t adapt quick enough. They take years to catch up to things. “
At first, they took on all of the teaching themselves, but after experiencing their first worldschooling hub in Luxor, Egypt, they now make it a point to incorporate a hub into their travels every 2 to 3 months.
“We signed up for a learning hub which is something we had never done and we were unsure about how it would go [but] we loved the hub… it was great for the kids and it worked well for them being at a group with other kids,” says Jak while also mentioning the added bonus of being able to get more work done during the day while the kids were off at the hub.
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