Not Good Enough!!

Am not sure we understand the amount of pressure we place on primary school kids - especially the ones that excel. You’d think that only the ones who perform dismally are under pressure to perform, but apparently the sword is double-edged...at least that’s what I feel writing this. Performing has never been a difficult thing for me; when your mind is as curious as mine, it takes a lot to convince it that impossible is a word worth your time. Risks come easy for me, because the pursuit for knowledge and understanding will often take you down ‘the path less travelled’.

I have interesting memories of my childhood - school memories that more often than not made me the exception - the odd one out. Problem is, it’s not the kind of exception that makes you feel bad or neglected; it’s the kind that places the limelight on you and highlights you - even when being highlighted is the last thing on your mind. Sometimes you just want to be invisible. Because invisibility offers a convenience that visibility cannot afford - you get to sit back and figure things out without a tonne of pressure, and you get to see the picture from an outsider’s point of view.

Anyways, I was the kind of person that was expected to churn out 100% at all times and in all subjects. Anything less than that was simply unacceptable! I have gone home with cane bruises and pinch marks for scoring 96% and 98% because these marks were not worthy of me - or so I was made to believe. I could not protest; I could not complain. That’s just the way it was meant to be. And I was the (un)willing victim of excellence in academia by force. And the price was mine to pay - whether or not I was willing.

So, there is this one time that I accidentally repeated the question number on my answer sheet. I don’t know if students nowadays still use the answer sheet paper that is cut off from a math exercise book or if the multiple choice system still exists, but that was me in my primary school days. And so what repeating a question number means is that your only chance at a correct answer is if the response to two or three consecutive questions is the same multiple choice. You can imagine how many questions I got wrong from a fifty questions exam. Good luck was that the repeated number was 18 and so I had at least 18 well done questions. I got 24 out of 50 in that paper. Can you now imagine what happened to me?

Thank God I am here to tell the story!