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?
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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!