Can I get some help with school

[dyresand]

i would but i am on break away from my programming work.

[Heat]

Do you think you guys could give me some tips or advice on how i can make boring work more interesting or bearable? I like all the advice, but i would appreciate some help on how to take small steps and go through the process of doing no homework/bare minimum to doing all my homework. If you can sympathize with me, I do appreciate the advice, not sugarcoating it, and just saying "if you want to go to a college you just need to do the work, even if it sucks", and you have helped me realize this @everyone so thanks. However, youve got to understand how daunting it is to just be told "Okay we know homework is boring and tedious, but just do it anyways". I want to start getting back on track and reading your replies helped me refocus on what matters, but now i have this image painted in my mind that I have to go from literally doing no homework to doing all of it, which makes me just want to do it even less.

[drfuzzy]

Well, yeah, Heat, we know it's boring, but you just gotta force yourself.

There are ways to make it . . . tolerable.  1) Find a goal and really convince yourself that getting through these assignments is absolutely essential.  2) Find a way to make the study less painful - do it in groups.  Study groups are amazing at making the boring, a little less boring.  You all have the same goal.  3) Restrict access to distractions until the work is done.  This is difficult - it may require parental involvement.  But if you love TV, Netflix, movies, or are a gamer - parents can pull that plug until you show homework success.  Sometimes even removal of the computer is required - unless you need it for a class.  But boy, does it ever work.  It makes all of those media/game things you love into a reward for finishing assignments.

Or you could spend a few weeks with MY parents.  If my chores and homework weren't done by dinner, I didn't GET dinner. 

I think the secret is the intellectual/emotional framing here:  you see homework as boring and taking you away from a dozen things that you would rather do.  The moment that you can see homework as a stepping stone into something that you really WANT, that problem is gone.

In America (if that's where you are), grades are very important to getting accepted into a college program.  If you're going to study a trade, you just need to pay for class . . . 

Good luck.

[CapnAwesome]

High School isn't actually important for anything.

It's important for college.

Not really. I had mediocre high school grades, went to a regular college and got excellent grades there, which I used to get into a better college. I have friend with a masters degree who didn't even graduate the 10th grade in high school. She just went to community college and then to University. I'd argue that even going to college isn't really always that important though. It depends on what you want to do with your life. College is a good way to get lots of debt and be forced into the workforce though.

[SteelCurtain]

Heat, the only thing I can think of that might work to make tedious tasks more interesting is to:

1) Find a reward system that works for you. If it's candy, games, AF.org time, whatever. You don't get to do what you want to do until homework is done.
2) Figure out what you want to do in life. You're super young to make hard plans, but set goals. Want to be a computer programmer? Better be shit hot at math and logic. Better get into a halfway decent school and work your ass off to make that happen. Getting excited about your future makes working hard to get there that much easier.

If you're looking for a trick to make homework exciting, there just isn't one. If you're not enamored with the subject matter, it's just going to be busywork and practice. But man, if that practice isn't worth it when you get to college and have 17 credit hours of coursework plus a job and a penchant for partying on the weekend. You're going to need those skills. If you don't have them, college will be just like high school. And that, my friend, would be sad.

[CapnAwesome]

Heat, the only thing I can think of that might work to make tedious tasks more interesting is to:

1) Find a reward system that works for you. If it's candy, games, AF.org time, whatever. You don't get to do what you want to do until homework is done.
2) Figure out what you want to do in life. You're super young to make hard plans, but set goals. Want to be a computer programmer? Better be shit hot at math and logic. Better get into a halfway decent school and work your ass off to make that happen. Getting excited about your future makes working hard to get there that much easier.

If you're looking for a trick to make homework exciting, there just isn't one. If you're not enamored with the subject matter, it's just going to be busywork and practice. But man, if that practice isn't worth it when you get to college and have 17 credit hours of coursework plus a job and a penchant for partying on the weekend. You're going to need those skills. If you don't have them, college will be just like high school. And that, my friend, would be sad.

That's terrible advice to be a programmer. Nobody in the programming world cares what school you went to. They only care how well you can program. My younger brother is a programmer, he didn't go to college except for maybe a quarter and has never taken a computer science class in his life. It would have been silly for him to take one in most colleges. Nobody that he's worked for has ever even asked him. It's not a concern of people who are hiring programmers.

I'm not saying college isn't useful, esspecially for many science degrees or medical or law school or something of that like. But most colleges programming departments are a joke, I used to TA for one at my college (even though I was a history major). They are behind the programming world, taught by tenured professors who are way out of date. Academia is a very poor format for teaching programming skills.

[SteelCurtain]

That's terrible advice to be a programmer. Nobody in the programming world cares what school you went to. They only care how well you can program.

Sure, if your goal is to hack code at $20/hr for a living. If you want to be a project lead at a young age, if you want to work for a major company and make fantastic money, the best way to do that is still college. If you want to innovate, you need to understand advanced data structures and algorithms and be fluent in multiple languages, and you're not gonna get that at ITT tech. Also, the field is moving towards IS, and I bet Tibs would tell you he is grateful for his schooling.

There are always exceptions to the rule. There are hyper talented kids that taught themselves everything and make great programmers. I wouldn't count on that. And I'm not.

[CapnAwesome]

That's terrible advice to be a programmer. Nobody in the programming world cares what school you went to. They only care how well you can program.

Sure, if your goal is to hack code at $20/hr for a living. If you want to be a project lead at a young age, if you want to work for a major company and make fantastic money, the best way to do that is still college. If you want to innovate, you need to understand advanced data structures and algorithms and be fluent in multiple languages, and you're not gonna get that at ITT tech. Also, the field is moving towards IS, and I bet Tibs would tell you he is grateful for his schooling.

There are always exceptions to the rule. There are hyper talented kids that taught themselves everything and make great programmers. I wouldn't count on that. And I'm not.

Having a degree probably matters less in computer science than any other field. Also if you have an interest, it's probably one of the things that you can teach yourself far easier then say, biology or chemistry. You just start programming. I would say the only advantage to going to college for a CS degree is being around other programmers. You are also going to accumulate debt and be forced into the workplace, maybe have to take a job you don't want to as well.

[Cato]

Steel's first idea is critical, but I'll add to it. Whatever your system of reward is, make it an uncompromising routine. I highly recommend that the reward be flexible in that you can do whatever you want. In high school I would get home from practice, grab a shower and get straight to work. I wouldn't sacrifice quality, but I made a race of it. Homework had priority, but it stood in the way of whatever fun the evening had in store. This discipline would serve me well later in the nuclear Navy, college, as a sailor, at home and in my post military career. If your interested I'll explain exactly how.

[SteelCurtain]

Having a degree probably matters less in computer science than any other field. Also if you have an interest, it's probably one of the things that you can teach yourself far easier then say, biology or chemistry. You just start programming.

Yes, for the bottom level jobs hacking code.

Not satisfied with that. I easily could teach myself any language. It's not the languages that require the higher education. It's the career specific stuff. I wouldn't have been able to teach myself discrete/advanced data structures. Much of the IS stuff is fucking heavy.