I cant make myself do work

[Solomon7t]

A little background: Im 16 years old, im in 11th grade, and I started doing homeschool at the tail end of the last school year. I started doing homeschool because I broke my ankle really badly and i wasnt able to take the bus to school everyday. So I finished last year in homeschool and decided I would do the rest of highschool in homeschool. I made this decision because the work is very easy and I dont like doing lots of work (bad reason!). Ive always been a C student, doing the bare minimum to pass classes and spending the rest of my time goofing off.

Enough of the background, heres the problem: I hate homeschool. Ive told my parents that starting next year I want to go back to public school (funny, usually people try to escape public school). Now all I have to do is finish this year of homeschool and then I can go back to my normal life. Since Ive started homeschool my social life has completely died. I dont ever see any of my friends. Im only in contact with one of my friends from school, and thats through ICQ. I spend my entire day in my room and rarely go out further then the liquor store for the occasional candy stockup. Ive got so much freetime that you would think I could finish my homeschool really fast. Thats what I thought. However, I cant make myself do my work. Im constantly lying to my parents about how much work Ive done. Im supposed to be about a quarter of the way into my second semester, but Im barely finishing the first semester in three of my classes and the fourth class (history) Im about a quarter way through. All the classwork is incredibly easy but I just cant get myself to do the work. I start working on a lesson and then give up on it after a couple minutes and browse the web or whatever. Summer is only three months away and Im so far behind on my work that I will be doing school work during summer. My parents have no idea how far behind I am and I cant tell them. So this school work is like a monkey on my back and its constantly growing. Combine that with the fact that I live at my computer/tv and my life really sucks. I dont know why I decided to rant this in MPSIMS, but I need to tell someone. Sorry for wasting everyones time with this.

[Tattva]

Your parents need to be more involved in your schooling. How is your work graded, if at all?

You need to tell your parents that you would like them to help you get on the ball. Have them check your assignments daily. You may be 16 and old enough to be responsible, but the public school system doesn't let their students turn in their work whenever they finish it. Due dates are an important motivation.

If you really don't think you can involve them, then you need to take more responsibility. Set up a reward system for yourself. Suggestions: For each assignment finished in a day, allow yourself 30 minutes of web time. Or a TV show. Turn off the computer/TV until you're done. Don't do your schoolwork where you can see these temptations.

You might want to chart out the rest of your lessons; see how long it's going to take you to finish. Spread out your work.

My little brother (he's your age) is homeschooled and has been for 4-5 years now. He is given specific lessons with a due date for each lesson. If my parents didn't monitor him, he would spend all his time playing Zelda on N64.

Good luck.

[Zyada]

I agree with Tattva that your parents should be taking more responsibility for your schoolwork; however, as long as they aren't, you need to take responsibility yourself.

If Tattva's suggestion overwhelms you, try this:

Buy a timer. (Get a cool digital one)
Make a list of your classes. Doesn't matter what order.
Set the timer for 5 minutes. You can do anything for 5 minutes, right? Spend 5 minutes doing work on one of the classes. Then spend 5 minutes doing something else. Then another class, etc. Maybe between rounds do something that takes a little longer than 5 minutes.

After a couple of days of this, increase your time to 10 minutes, then 15, then 30. See how long you can spend doing something before it starts bugging you, and how much you can get done in such a small amount of time.

But do this for yourself - if you don't get it now, the rest of your life is going to be a lot harder than it could have been.