Kate Laird graduated from Harvard with a degree in history, a good set of study skills, and a 100-ton captain's license.
Her first teaching job began seven days after graduation, tutoring three children on a sailboat crossing the Pacific. That "year off" turned into twenty-five, as she worked on boats around the world, sometimes pausing to write about it.

In the middle, she taught for another two years at the University of New Hampshire, while earning an MA in English, but then didn't think much more about education until it came time to teach her two daughters. The last twelve years have been devoted to their educations, as the family worked and traveled on the edges of civilization from Greenland to Antarctica, Tierra del Fuego to New Zealand, through the South Pacific to Japan, and now to Alaska.