Yesterday I was spending some time reading newspaper. I was attracted to the news on students’ individual performance in SPM last year. What touched me the most was that they excelled despite their family’s undesirable conditions. Or maybe their family’s condition was the factor contributing towards their determination to excel in their studies. For example there is this Chinese girl whose father was made bedridden and brain damaged due to a road accident when she was only six year old. I cried when I read her story . I mean I can really relate to her feelings when she cried on her father’s bed showing the results, I am not sure whether the father understood or not his daughter’s achievement. And there’s another Malay girl who went to school hungry everyday and had nothing to eat but a little bread. I mean what kind of life a child had to go through while they are growing up. I know their parents must have cried in their hearts for their children and to know they prioritize to buy books for their children over life sustenance is heart wrenching.
When all these stories of achievement came out, all kind of establishment began to donate and provide money/facilities to aid them and families. Good, but I wish these establishments should have started earlier to relief the burden when the children were still schooling and growing up.
I have been reading these kinds of student stories from year to year particularly on achievements by students from poor background. Admiration of their life and to understand what drove their excellence despite of lack of books, no tuitions, no computers and going to just normal school in the village. Most of them did not study to tackle exams like most rich kids do in tuition classes.
These students love reading and they read from when they were small. These students spent their free time in activities they love which is reading and studying. It’s like part of their normal routine life and they don’t find it boring. They don’t really hang out at the malls or go out here and there with friends day and night or weekends. They don’t have Astro to watch. Over the years reading and studying become second nature to them as a routine. As they excel more and more in school they began to feel good about themselves and they began to do more of study to enjoy the results. It’s become a cycle except it’s not a vicious one. The magnitude of the product and result is a function of the effort, time spent, interest and determination.
I am not really stressing on the number of As one should score in exams. I believe in overall development in all aspects of life for children to develop awareness and maturity. But I salute these students for their achievement despite of hardships they endured.
