Before entering school, my son absolutely loved learning. He loved a challenge and took great pleasure in discussion and discovery.
By the end of second grade, it seemed all but snuffed out. He seems to enjoy being known as the smartest kid in the class, but he doesn't want to be too smart. For example, he was allowed to pretest in math and he had a packet of more advanced material to work on whenever the teacher was covering something he had already mastered - but he hated it. Right before the end of school he said he lost it; I suspect he threw it out because he hadn't completed much of it. I think he didn't like being the only kid who had a packet of any kind. There were other indications, too, that he was holding himself back so as not to appear too different.
I was hoping that, while staying with his grandparents for the summer weekdays, his enthusiasm would return. I designed several special projects in his interest areas, hoping to reignite the spark, but grandma was apparently intimidated and overwhelmed, and she didn't do a single one. Instead, she assigned pages from a second-grade workbook. Ah well, at least she accepted my request to start teaching him to type, and his typed summer journals have been better than the handwritten ones from school.
Now that school is two weeks away, he is excited, but (I think) only because he'll get to see the other kids again. I don't think he's even curious about what he might learn this year.
So, after all this long-windedness, we get to my question: those of you with older children, did you see fluctuations in this area? Is there some kind of cyclical nature to a person's love of learning or is this ebb the end of the line?
Is there still reason to hope?
