WBUR reported last week about 15 BostonDay and Evening Academy students who are spending three weeks this summer aboard a schooner studying climate change, ecology and the ocean as they sail to Nova Scotia.
The ship’s captain, Tom Ryan, and the crew all agree that time aboard the Roseway is designed, like BDEA, to function as alternative education. There are no grades, just tasks to be done and roles to play. “What should they expect? To be challenged like they’ve never been challenged,” Ryan says.
But that’s exactly what Gonzalez says she was looking for: three weeks without a phone, out of touch with family except for postcards, and surrounded by classmates familiar and not. (Normally, she says, “I pretty much try to keep to myself.”)
She didn’t have a ready answer to why she chose to go aboard the Roseway instead of staying at home in Dorchester. “I’m just one of those people,” she says after thinking. “I’m just, like, really daring, but at the same time I have really bad anxiety — so I try to push myself out of that.”
Read and listen to the rest of the story on WBUR and check out the students’ updates to the Ships Log on the World Oceans School website.