Teach to Travel or Travel to Teach?

Are you a traveler at heart who teaches between trips? Or are you a teacher who travels in order to enrich children’s lives with experiences of other cultures? Either way you have some major passion in your heart. I find you can neither teach nor travel without strong motivation. Which am I? It depends on the day. If I come home from a rough Monday, I teach so I can afford my travels. If it’s late July, then I’ve been traveling so I can teach the next generation of explorers.

Teach to Travel:

• Traveling on a Budgetà If you teach to travel, then you must be a professional at stretching the dollar for long periods of time. Here’s to you! I still have my college mindset when I travel which is, spend little and get a lot. The get could be a piece of artwork or an extra excursion.
• Summer Tripsà Summer is the prime travel time. This sounds great, but that can backfire on you my teacher friends. Summer, along with the holidays, is when traveling prices go way up. The good thing for you is you have a lot more flexibility with your travel dates. Flying midweek rather than on the weekends really can save you some money that can be spent better elsewhere. You also get to take longer trips and therefore get to do more traveling within a region. I have a teacher friend who takes a big trip each summer (sounds familiar…). Last summer he went to South America. He did a tour with some of his other teacher friends through Peru, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. One of my mentor teachers took a “back to our roots” with his wife starting in Ireland, where his family was from, down the east coast of Africa to Kenya, where her family was from. To take trips like these and actually be able to experience the place you need time. You also need money, but teaching isn’t necessarily the best job for funding these excursions.
• Teachers Travel Free Programsà At a social studies conference I learned that there are ways teachers can travel domestically or internationally for free. FREE. Who doesn’t love that? Teachers have to apply and then, if accepted, write lesson plans in return. Sounds easy enough! There are a couple of different programs depending on where you want to go. Check out this link for information on programs like The Korea Society, TOP, and Fulbright. 

Travel to Teach:

Williamsburg, VA

• Freebies & Discountsà Wherever you go, take your teacher’s badge. You never know when you might benefit from it! Back in 2012 I went to Virginia and while there we visited Mount Vernon. One section of the museum was for children and near there was for teachers. Yay! Free teaching materials! I was able to get a whole folder full of materials. I do no teach about George Washington, but I was able to pass it off to the fourth grade teachers at my school. Another plus is all you can learn on your travels. Take the guided tours, grab handfuls of brochures, and take pictures! I often laminate the brochures to use as research materials or as examples for projects. I tend to want to travel more to places I actually teach about because I know I get to teach about it.
• Out of Town Conferencesà Use teaching as an excuse to travel! There are conferences all the time! Your county or school district most likely will reimburse you for the trip. Even better! I love going to the GCSS conference in Athens, GA each year. I learn how to be a better teacher and I get to visit my alma mater (Go Dawgs!). I’ve had coworkers go to sessions in Atlanta, Savannah, and even Washington, D.C. Take advantage of any free time and do some sightseeing. 
• COST Programà AKA Consortium for Overseas Student Teaching  – this is how I got to go to Ecuador. I was there for three months and completed my student teaching there in an international school. I cannot begin to explain how much this study abroad helped me grow up both as a teacher and as a young adult. I highly suggest COST to any and every education major. You get to spend a semester abroad and it sets your resume apart (in a good way!). Check out my old blog for more details on that chapter of my life. 
• Field Tripsà What better way to encourage students to travel than to actually take them somewhere? Even if you only go down the street, I promise you they will get 100 times more from that one day than sitting in a classroom merely hearing about it for a week. Think about it.

name tag, coffee, and bulldog-
all a teacher needs at the GCSS conference!

Whether you teach so you have longer vacation time to take those more extravagant trips, such as hiking sections of the John Muir Trail or spending two weeks at an all-inclusive Caribbean resort, or you travel so you can take pieces of the world home with you to share with others, both traveling and teaching are rewarding endeavors. Props to you for participating in one or both!