Competition for Brilliance

Seeing this prompt brought a lot of memories to me. Back in the day when I was in primary and secondary school, school wasn't just centered on passing examinations; it was more about who came out first, second, or third. We were toiling our brains just to attain the most treasured positions, which were the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd.

"The person that took first position, does he or she have two heads?" My uncle's wife would tackle her children whenever it was time for academic results and they came below first position. It got worse whenever they took positions like 4th, 5th, and so on.

"Who took first position? That girl again?" My dad was always worried anytime he found out that a girl took the first position while I took second or third. As long as it wasn't a girl ahead of me, he wouldn't be bothered.

So everything academic was very competitive back then, and we were ready to do anything to climb up the ladder. Thankfully, there was nothing like sorting teachers in primary school. It was pure academic smartness.

In secondary school, there was nothing like the attachment of positions in the results, but it was even worse because of how difficult it was to pass exams and get promoted to the next class.

In those days, in that particular government school I attended, in a class of 200 students, a maximum of 70 students would get promoted, and it was consistently like that. They made it very competitive to be among the promoted students, especially when crossing from JSS to SSS and when graduating successfully from secondary school with usable results.

There was a time some of our classmates broke into the school office at night before the examination period. They got their hands on the questions in all the subjects, and they refused to let the details out of their group. Oh yes, they wanted to pass alone and be among the students that would be promoted. We didn't get to know all this until the second-to-last day of the exams when the news started spreading loudly. The exams, including the ones already written, were canceled and another date was fixed.

Just to pass and be very outstanding, I enrolled in different tutorial classes that were outside our school setting. Basic subjects like Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry were taught there, and the lecture days were very demanding alongside my school schedule. There was no breathing space at all. From school that started at 7:45 am and closed at 2:30 pm, I would move straight to tutorials that lasted from 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm, and sometimes until 6:30 pm depending on how spirited the teacher was.

And in all this, some colleagues would be laughing at us for going the extra mile and taking learning too seriously.

I must admit though, what we had in the school system back then was very intense in competition, but it made us very sharp and brilliant. We can't use today's education pattern to compare with what we had then. These days, a lot of schools no longer award numeric rankings to students in a class according to their performance in exams. The only time I worked as a staff member in the academic section made me see how weakened the school system has become in this era.

Thanks for reading.

This is my entry to Week 207, Edition 03 of the Weekly Featured contest in Hive Learners Community

Image source: Own Image