My parents decided to give me access to the Internet when I was 12-13 years old. I remember coming home one day from school and finding my room in kind of a mess, with new cables around my computer and a small rectangular thing close to it.
I wasn't sure what was happening, but I got extremely happy once my mother told me that the small rectangle was a "modem" and that I will finally have access to the Internet.
Since then, I spent most of my time in front of my computer, talking to all kind of people in online chats, watching maybe too many YouTube videos and playing all kind of stupid online games.
I specifically remember spending at least 6 to 8 hours a day in a very bad MMORPG called Metin 2, even though I never managed to get past level 32 or 34.
Now, I can't say I regret wasting all that time. It was wasted time, but I not only had quite a lot of fun, but I learned a lot of things. The people I spent time with taught me more than I ever learned about how to not be a jerk, and how to talk to others, some even constantly advised me to read, which is another reason why I started reading later in life, all the games I played taught me how to be a better person, no matter how hard that may be to believe, and spending so much time in front of my computer is the reason I'm here today, writing and trying to work from home.
What I do regret however, is the reason why I wasted all that time, and, if you didn't already guess, I'm talking about school.
I had to go to school at around 8 in the morning, then spend 6 to 7 hours there, and then come home. I also had homework, had to take private lessons when it came to math and other important subjects and even though I wasn't always doing it often, I had to study from time to time to make sure I'll pass.
All that, every day, made me hate studying, made me consider it useless, and that's one of the main reasons I never spent my time doing anything productive when I was young. I just came home from school, did whatever I had to do, then I sat down in front of my computer and I just played games for as long as I could.
Having to study a bunch of things I wasn't interested in, just to have a "better future" that I didn't even care about, at a time when all I wanted to do was to have fun, was what made me hate studying and learning new things.
Only later in life, after I finished high school, I started learning things on my own, after I discovered how useful it can be to just know things. I even got obsessed with studying after I finished school, both because I enjoyed it, and because I felt a need to kinda learn all the things I needed that school didn't teach me.
If you're in school, or if you already finished school, here's a little piece of advice that probably a lot of other people will give you as well in life - start studying. Not what school teaches you, or tried to teach you, but things you care about, things you like, things you're interested in.
If you're still in school, try to spend around an hour doing something productive that you like. It can be reading, learning how to code, how to create games, learning about history, math, and so on. Forget about how school tries to force you to learn certain things, and just invest your time into learning something you like.
If you finished school and you still hate studying because of all the bad memories you have from school, just try to do it once more, this time, at your own pace, and focusing on the subjects you like most.
No one is there to make fun of you for not being great any more, no one is there to remind you how much time you have left to finish your assignment. Just learn what you want whenever you want, and, luckily, you'll realize how great learning new things is, and how much time you wasted when you were young just because your teachers and the educational system had no idea how to motivate you and make you curious.
Interesting story, I think many can relate to this! But as a child you don't know any better and of course they are more attracted to a direct boost of joy than to the long process of learning a new skill, no matter how interesting the teacher makes the subject. Could it be that it also depends on the guardians to pursue a healthy balance?
Balance created by parents is indeed important, but the way the teachers make subjects interesting also matters a lot.
Yes, as a kid you'll always pursue instant gratification, but a teacher can easily make something that is usually boring for a kid, interesting.
For example, when I was in sixth grade, I had a biology teacher that made biology so interesting for us, that I was really interested in learning more about the subject and understanding how different or similar animals were from us (we were learning about animals at the time).
A year later, we had another teacher that wasn't as interested as the one we had before in making things seem cool to us. She just wanted us to learn and nothing else. I immediately lost my motivation to do anything productive related to biology.
At the same age I had another English teacher that was young and knew how to get our attention when she was teaching, and that motivated me to pay more attention in class and try to learn everything I could just to impress her.
The following year she had to leave, and we had another teacher, and the same thing happened - she didn't care about making things interesting for us, she just wanted us to do our "job" and learn, which immediately made me lose my motivation and not care about the subject.
And that applied to other kids in my class as well. Many were complaining about how bad the new teachers were and how well the previous ones were teaching.
So yeah, instant gratification is something young people are looking for, but if someone knows how to make even the most boring subject seem even a little interesting, then a kid can easily get motivated to study more or even learn a new skill.
It also depends on the kid, of course, but as a general rule I think that teachers who can make the subject they are teaching seem interesting will usually motivate a lot more kids to learn than boring teachers who doesn't really care about what they do.
(sorry for any grammatical mistakes, I'm writing this at quite a late hour)
Thanks for the response. For me it was quite the opposite, I had some teachers who really enjoyed what they were doing but when I got home almost nothing could interest me to do my homework and I wished my parents would have restricted me more on that matter. But I totally agree with your point of view, overall I learned so much more from those teachers who did a great job at making the subject interesting!