Trouble with Adsense

Hey, guys. So, I’ve recently signed up with Google Adsense and I want to put some ads on my website. I want to do it with a text widget where I enter the code Google gives me and thus the ads appears basically where I place the text widget. I think this is how most people do it? Anyway, it doesn’t work. I’ve watched dozens of videos and read through many forums, but none seem to have the same problem as me: it’s not that the ad doesn’t appear, but rather the code itself appears on my website as text. Isn’t the ad supposed to automatically appear when I enter the HTML code? What can I do? Thank you all so much.