About the Homework Help Guy:
Are you also tired of school? I am a high school sophomore, and I really like helping others whenever I can. By creating this website, I thought I could help others easily. My goal is to help others like me in their quest to learning anything they want. Sometimes, school can be an obstacle, rather than a tool, when it comes to learning. During the final months of school, I had been exhausted, only sleeping for a few hours a day, mostly after I got home from school. I did great during the school year, getting some of the highest grades at my school and competing intra-regionally for Varsity Quiz and mathematics, my favorite subject. Assuming that hard work was the main reason why I did well in the past school year is quite a superficial way of looking at it. And it is rather incorrect. Things that appear to be hard work, if done on account of interest, should not be considered hard work for the adjective hard is defined as "requiring a great deal of endurance or effort". In the past couple of months, rather than doing anything that required a great deal of endurance or effort, I had been engaging in activities that I enjoyed: reading books and articles about things that piqued my interests, watching videos on Youtube and Coursera, programming, building websites and applications, and doing graphical designing.
The key here is not hard work, but interest.
When a person is interested in something, take soccer for example, and likes to participate in certain activities, such as practicing a scissor kick (a trick in soccer), she/he does it ungrudgingly and enjoys it, and therefore would have a higher tendency to stay focused throughout the entire process. This helps in both the accumulation of information and the development of cognitive and psycho-motor skills. And during the process, the person would experience an increase in the level of dopamine in her/his brain and, as a result, would be positively reinforced without requiring any actual extrinsic motivation, for instance the reward one receives upon coming up first in a soccer tournament. In another words, she/he would be motivated intrinsically. People who are motivated intrinsically would more likely to carry on with the activity even when it consists of difficult tasks. This is particularly true for the process of knowledge acquisition, which is why rather than being an orthodox student and studying hard, I learn about things that I like enthusiastically because I find them interesting. And I was given the opportunity to do so this summer.
In order to sustain an interest in what one is learning, one should employ a customized methodology that is most suitable for her/him. Diverse methodologies to study a certain subject is something the current education system is not doing a good job providing students with. This is no surprise for a system built on a fast-food model instead of a model based on principles of agriculture. Students are to follow a standardized procedure to study a subject, quite resembling how data are transferred from a machine to another using TCP/IP in a network. They are assigned to learn a set of facts confined in what we know as "syllabus" in a predetermined order similar to how machines are assigned to execute a set of tasks in a deterministic algorithm. It is true that some students may design their own approach to study a subject with the help of teachers or parents, but that is inadequate as long as the confinement exists.
So, the upshot here is that the most efficient way to be good at something is to do what you are interested in. This means that if you are interested in something which you want to pursue in life because that is who you are or who you want to be, just go for it, unshackled by others' opinion about you. If you want to excel in something you are not so keen on, try finding the enthusiasm for it, in another words using neuroplasticity to get yourself intrinsically motivated. This can be a little bit tricky as you are trying to convince yourself to be interested in something that you are not. You have to have strong and self-justifiable reasons behind it and reasons as shallow as being able to do well in a test do not qualify as one. If you are not yet sure about what your interests are, just keep searching for them as you explore different things in life, and one day you would discover that they have always been in the unconscious mind of yours, influencing your decision making, and you were just not aware of them.
This is the basis for autodidacticism, and I want to encourage everyone reading this to become an autodidact. I find it to be the only way that I can truly learn; memorizing random facts and testing on them is, in a nutshell, what modern education has come to be. Screw that.
Yours truly,