It all started at the end of SS1's second term. Results had just come in, and I found out I got the 30th position out of 32 students.
I don’t think I had ever felt as much shame as I felt in that single moment as my eyes lingered on the notice board where the results were stapled.
My whole world came crashing down. What will my mom say? My dad would be so disappointed in me; my friends would look at me like the failure that I am. My life is over.
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All of a sudden, my previous excitement for the holiday vanished, and was replaced with a strong, dreadful feeling. I remember telling my mom the awful news. I expected her to crash out on me and yell. But she remained silent, as if trying to collect her emotions.
She then gave me a warm loving scolding, and then encouraged me and told me that I was better than that. Some of my friends did amazingly well, and if they could do it, then I could do it. She told me to focus on the primary reason I was in school, which was to get an education.
After having that discussion with her, I internalized what she said, and realized that she was right. After the holiday ended and the new term rolled around, I resumed with a spirit filled with zeal, zeal to learn and be the best I could possibly be.
I cut off all the unnecessary yapping I so often engaged in and focused on my books. I used to be one of the noisemakers in the class, but this new term, my voice was barely heard in conversations.
My head was always buried in my book, reading something or solving calculations. I put in as much effort as I could muster, and when I felt like giving up, I took breaks but ultimately never lost sight of the goal.
Whenever I would read my book, a picture of the notice board filled with our results for the new term would flash through my head, and I would smile and continue reading. There was no way my name was going to fall so low on the list again this term.
I was determined to rank high on the list, by fire or by thunder. There was a funny thing that would always happen when I read. The girl sitting beside me, Chisom, was also jovial like me. And we both would crack jokes then.
But in the new term, when she saw that I had stopped doing all that, she too tapered down on how frequently she joked around. Anytime she noticed that I picked my book to read, she would end whatever discussion she was having and also pick up her book😅😅.
It felt weird to be a positive influence on someone for once😅.
Finally, the long-awaited midterm approached. And the “time of reckoning”-as our Agric teacher called it—was upon us. They never announced when they would post the results on the board; it would just happen.
So we, the students, kept a close watch on the notice board, should the teacher in charge come to paste results. Days passed and we got nothing. Until one day, when we were in our hostel during the afternoon siesta, one of my classmates had just come back from the school area, and she told us that the results had been posted.
Immediately, my classmates and I scrambled to wear our daywear and then sprinted to school to the notice board. When I got there, lo and behold, the results had been pasted.
My eyes hastily scanned through all the results till it landed on my class.
First... no,
second... no,
third... no, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth!!!
I got the eighth position in the class. Not exactly what I was hoping for when compared to the first seven, but coming from someone who was the 30th out of 32 students last term? Yeah, I will take it happily🤗🤗
Heck yeah! I was so proud of myself. And guess what? Chisom got the 6th position 🤗. In a weird way, that made me even happier.