Jackson teacher embarks on Vietnam cycling adventure

Making learning an adventure is Brad Haertling’s personal motto, but it’s also the one he has emblazoned at the top of his blog.

Haertling, a middle-school teacher in Jackson, is cycling through Vietnam and sharing his experiences with summer-school students via pedalingpioneer.com.

Helping in the effort is fellow teacher Meredith Reyna, who has been taking video clips and still photos from the trek and uploading them for students at this end of the world.

“(Brad) has cycled five days so far between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City,” said Reyna, a foreign-language teacher in the Jackson district. “He’s traveling along National Highway 1, which spans between the two cities.”

Reyna is supplementing the curriculum with Vietnamese vocabulary words and names for students to adopt as part of the fun.

Haertling, who teaches history and seventh-grade world geography, began the trip May 29 with longtime friend Danny Rees, who’s mainly serving as resident photographer and videographer until the adventure ends June 23.

Although Haertling has traveled all over the globe, he said the trip to Vietnam is something he and Rees had wanted to do for years. Doing it for educational purposes was the icing on the cake.

“I really wanted to allow the students to see these events (and the country) through my eyes. Using the website and having a co-teacher in the classroom allows me to do this,” Haertling wrote in an email.

He said the route between the capital city of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City to the south is 1,100 miles, which can be ridden in a few weeks.

“Three weeks is approximately the time that the students are in summer school,” he wrote.

This isn’t the first time Haertling has provided a firsthand educational account.

Last year and the year before, he biked along part of the 2,170-mile Oregon Trail, a former wagon route that once connected the Missouri River Valley with the Western U.S. territories.

The first time he went, Haertling retraced 950 miles of the old settlers’ trail. The next summer, he took on 1,100 miles from Casper, Wyoming, to Oregon City, Oregon.

All the while, Haertling worked with another co-teacher, Rachel Glisson, to animate lessons about 19th-century westward expansion through videos, FaceTime, blogs and tweets.

Part of those excursions were funded by the Jackson R-II Foundation and other donors, but the trip to Vietnam is completely self-funded.

Haertling is using the stipend he receives to teach summer school to cover the cost of his plane fare to Vietnam and is paying for food, lodging and other expenses out of pocket.

So far, aside from elaborate Buddhist shrines and striking natural landmarks, Haertling said his biggest surprise has been encountering several groups of people off the highway roasting whole goats on sticks and using household fans to blow at the flames — a la Vietnamese barbecue.

“There is literally something new that we have never seen before in every mile of our journey,” he said.

ljones@semissourian.com

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