When you strive to become better than you are, everything around you becomes better too

The new academic year is scheduled to come to an end in March this year with the current class eight and form fours sitting their Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) and Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) respectively. Thereafter, the current grade fives and the first CBC (Competency-Based Curriculum) cohort in addition to the current class sevens and form threes will be having their national exams later in the year. With the packed year and busy schedule ahead, and general elections forthcoming, the students must be ready physically, emotionally and psychologically to conquer the exam fever and emerge with their heads high.

I know that you may have gone to Ngong Hills for an excursion or maybe climbed a mountain to the top. If so, what did you carry with you? A backpack, right? What was in the backpack and was it heavy to carry through to the mountain top? If you carried none, how easy or otherwise was the process to the top of the mountain? In one way or the other, the person that had a heavy backpack might have had a long journey to the top. It must have been sweaty, tiring and time-consuming. To some extent, you might have even given up the dream of getting to the top, unlike the one that had less luggage to carry.

This analogy is a representation of how students’ lives in achieving academic excellence are. To attain educational distinction, candidates must strive to discard and avoid at all costs these seven ‘luggage’ that for many years have derailed students’ accomplishments.

Luggage of poor relationships

Human beings are social beings and so running away from a person is almost unattainable. Still, there comes a time when that is the only route to your destiny. We have friends in class, school or in our neighbourhoods that want more than they give. Friends who are not ready to build us by sharing knowledge or ideas with us. Friends who will come to us when we are studying to gossip but then again create their own time alone to study.  Do you know of the so-called buddies that will initiate a plan and call you to play the leading role in the execution? When in trouble, do they stand with you? Avoid these friends like plague.

The other type of poor friendship to avoid is the boy-girl relationship. This is not the best time to engage in one as it is emotionally, physically and psychologically draining in equal measures just like the exams you are preparing to take. You can never put the two in one pool and expect success. The two are always repelling and going the opposite direction. It is either you give room for this kind of relationship or your academic excellence. You cannot do both and emerge triumphantly.

Negative peer influence is also one of the poor relationships to discard. This, most of the time starts creeping in during the last weeks of the exam period. The feeling that you are finally completing one level makes you feel like you are above the law. Do not follow things to conform when in the real sense, they go against the Ten Commandments, your family values, your Religion and or the Constitution. Avoid running into trouble just to please the clique. They are not worth ‘dying’ for. What do you gain by ‘dying’ for your ‘friends’ only to be caught up with the punitive laws? This is not the time to be told to commit a crime and you follow blindly. Invoke God and your senses. Think critically because if found guilty, you will serve the jail term alone. Be morally and ethically correct at all times. You must therefore discard the said type of relationship luggage if you want to climb up the mountain of success.

Luggage of negativity

You might be scoring poor results now or getting way low marks than your expectations. You may be having a negative attitude towards a certain subject or a teacher, based on your earlier encounters. That must remain part of history and they must never control your destiny. If you stick to the negative experiences then you will be a negative person in your entire life. This has a way of controlling the person you become. Negative thinking makes you feel blue about yourself and the future. In the end, it contributes to low self-worth. It makes you feel you’re not effective in the world. Psychologists link negative thinking to depression, anxiety, chronic worry and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

You must therefore exercise positivity at this time. Speak positively about yourself knowing well that in life, there are times that we fail and the times we succeed. Do not be hard and harsh to yourself. Change your attitude by changing your circle of friends who are making you negative. See the glass as half full and not half empty. When for instance you score 48% from 44%, see the positive deviation of 4% and not a failure of not meeting the pass mark. This is why you are in class because you are a work in progress.

Luggage of working hard

Do not get me wrong here! We all need to work but there is a big difference between working hard and working SMART. Working hard pays but working SMART sustains the pay. How can a candidate work SMART? It means that you must set objectives that are simple, sensible and significant. The general objectives or goals in a subject or your targetted goal in life must also be motivating and meaningful to you. The target that you have set for the exams must be attainable and realistic based on the time you have. For the current candidates, what have you set to achieve in your national exams and what is the road map to achieving it? For instance, are you planning to score 450 marks when throughout terms one and two you have scored over 400 marks just once? Is this motivating? Is it realistic and for the less than two months to sit the national examinations, is it timebound?

Luggage of overconfidence

‘Bahari humzamisha mwogeleaji hodari’ is a Swahili saying that cautions us against overconfidence. For years now you might have seen a friend or heard stories of students who were best at a particular subject but never performed well when the time came to show what they are made of. You might be good at Mathematics but without being thorough in it, you might lose your gel in the said subject. Anytime you say that you are best in a particular subject, you must always strive to achieve the maximum points or marks in it. Consequently, take your time, analyse the questions, check on the distractors and above all follow the instructions. When you do this, then you will be as light as feather to go up the success mountain

Luggage of no revision

Most students believe much in the homework that they will dedicate their time to making sure that the homework is well done. This is not wrong. However, do you understand that most of the homework you do are limited to either topic, sub-strand or a specific area that the teacher intends to gauge your understanding on? This means that yesterday’s homework is dealing with a different topic or area from what you might be doing today. To make sure that there is consistency in recalling already learnt content, having a revision schedule will go a long way. Set up your revision schedule with contents from junior classes to where you are. The syllabus is made in a spiral format where contents in the previous cases are developed in the next class as you climb up the ladder. Hence, you must revise the previous contents too to remain afloat to get to the top.

Luggage of poor planning

This luggage is very critical in everything we achieve in our lives. You might have heard of the saying, a goal without a plan is just a wish. You might be also well acquainted with the famous saying that by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. What do the two sayings have to do with the time we have before sitting the national examination? Think of a timetable. Do you have one? Is it evenly distributed or is it based on your weak subjects?  Having a working timetable will help you to work on the ‘wastes’ that are unfavourable to your success. You must know when to wake up, what to do when you wake up and for what duration are you going to do it. Consistency and persistence are key here. You have to sacrifice to make it a habit. From the habit, you create a lifestyle in it. If you do not have one then you must do so at the tail end of this post because it is the jumpstarter to everything this term!

Luggage of Kiswahili

Finally, I want to be biased here! Every parent wants you to be good at Mathematics, Sciences and English. None of them thinks of the power of Kiswahili in fanning your future. Making silly mistakes in Swahili is seen as ‘stylish’. Kiswahili as a subject has had a negative view for a while now. In the 21st century, however, the language has had its mixed bag of fortunes. To one end laws have been enacted that have made the language equal to English while on the other end, the society has been influenced negatively by the Swahili slangs that have made every Swahili lover be seen as uneducated.

What society however do not understand is that Kiswahili as a subject and Swahili as a language have a great impact on which secondary school you will go to or what pathway to take. Statistically, it is like the Biblical connotation of the camel going through the needle’s eye literally if you score poorly in Kiswahili and ultimately score over 400 marks! The effects of this are dire. Hence, you must shape your thoughts towards this national language and reap bigtime when the results are announced.

By working on these seven luggage starting now, you are guaranteed success in your coming national examination. Always remember that the road to success and the road to failure are almost the same. However, success usually comes to that person who is too busy looking for it. When you strive to become better than you are, everything around you becomes better too because as George Eliot once said, “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

So, which one is your luggage that you must discard? Feel free to share your comments below.

Have a successful term ahead!