Life's not all games for circus children

CHICAGO -- They explore the old Boeing 727 plane as any group of students on a museum field trip might. They punch buttons, try out the passenger seats and pretend they're about to take off on a long journey.

But when told what the plane weighs -- 165,000 pounds, or about as much as 10 elephants -- several children, even one of the youngest, give knowing nods.

"Ohhh," the first-grader says. "We have 10 elephants at home."

Traveling teacher

If life for them sounds like a bit of a circus, it is -- the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus. They are the children of acrobats, trapeze artists, animal keepers and others who travel the country nearly year round with their families in tow.

For the kids, life on the road can be an education in itself. They get to visit sites many students only read about, from Bunker Hill to the U.S. Mint to, in this case, Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. It's one of the advantages of their journey by train, truck and trailer with a circus that -- elephants and all -- has been described as the largest city without a ZIP code.

But on many days, the school in this town comes in the form of a teacher who travels with them, providing a steady routine of homework and tests even as the scenery changes.

It's not the most glamorous side of the "Greatest Show on Earth." School accommodations are often cramped.

"We make do with what we have," says Brenda Shaw, teacher for the Ringling Bros. "red unit," one of two shows that crisscross the country.

In Chicago, it's a small, L-shaped dressing room at the United Center, which hosts the circus and other shows when the city's professional basketball and hockey teams aren't playing.

Beautiful isn't exactly the word for it. The windowless room only has space for a few tables, folding chairs and a large wooden box on rollers that carries the school's supplies from place to place.

No cotton candy

Yet Miss Shaw, as her students call her, has done her best to brighten the room's walls with student artwork and strings of leaves cut out of red, orange and yellow construction paper.

Older kids attend class in the morning, and their younger counterparts go in the afternoon. The half days might sound enticing to those who attend conventional school, but there's a catch.

The students attend class on any day the circus has shows scheduled. So that means they often go six -- and even sometimes seven -- days a week.

"We don't have a Sno Cone and cotton candy diet," Whitney says.

Sure, she likes to shop at the mall and go to movies in any town she visits, she says. In fact, she and her classmates spend much more time doing things like that than watching the circus show, which by now is old hat. Watching TV, walking dogs and playing games with each other also rank high on their lists.

But much of the students' time is spent on schoolwork.