Day One Hundred Eighty-Five

In news that will surprise me forever and ever and ever, Mila is continuing to do a very solid job of getting her school work done each day. Most of her classes are self-paced and there's no real deadline, and YET. She continues to do the work.

She is a master procrastinator in training. The fact that she's doing anything before she's told she HAS to is ... amazing.

But she's doing things a full week ahead. Purposely. Because she actually likes what she's doing.

This whole thing has been a shock for three weeks now. I thought it would wear off, but just today she promised to work ahead more so she wouldn't have to do school stuff on Friday. It's not going to entirely work out the way she wants it to, but I'm game for her little experiment. If she manages to get another full day ahead between now and Friday, I'll only ask her to do one thing on Friday. I'm of the opinion that she's going to lose interest in all things school at some point, and it will be good if she's ahead of the schedule when she does it.

The reason she's managing to be interested is because her school work is very much so designed to be what she wants to do. She watches a learning video, plays a game that reinforces the topic, and then takes a test. That's the cycle. Over and over - video, game, test. It's the same for nearly all of her classes and it means she's never far from getting to watch a video or play a game, both of which are activities she would do all day every day, if given the chance.

That test thing, though. Surprisingly enough, she doesn't hate the tests. She gets instant feedback on how she did, which is a HUGE bonus. She's not one for delayed gratification, you know? But ... it turns out she has been using that instant gratification thing as a way to game the system. Last week I learned that Mila tries every answer on the test until she gets it right. She has figured out how to always get 100% just by trying over and over and not even reading the question.

Obviously, this had to stop. But when confronted with what she was doing, Mila said, "I'm learning from my mistakes. It's fine," and really. It's really it's very hard to argue with logic like that.