springing forward

The weather change seems to have brought a major shift in Ray's sleep cycle. He'd been keeping to a mostly nocturnal lifestyle, but once he caught a whiff of warm spring air decided that being awake in the day-time might have some advantages after all. So for the past few weeks he's been struggling to shift back to more regular hours.

I'm fascinated to see him making these kinds of decisions so soon. I've been reading lots of other homeschoolers' tales of pulling kids out of school in the early teens and some take a whole year to decompress and be able to start making independent decisions, self-motivate, decide to learn actively rather than passively. A lot of that is just who Ray is - I mentioned that he seems to have a lot of "intrapersonal intelligence". He's really very introspective and thoughtful. I am glad, though, that George and I are already somewhat experienced in the world of autodidacticism - with Mo I mean. We're used to the idea that self-directed learning doesn't often "look like" school learning, so we're not all that tempted to nudge and coax and try to "get him to do things". That's a big hurdle for a lot of homeschoolers who are transitioning from either school or fairly structured homeschooling to interest based learning.