An Igbo proverb tells us that a man who does not know where
the rain began to beat him cannot say where he dried his body. (Adopted from,
Sir Chinua Achebe’s “There Was A Country”)
The rain that is currently beating students began immediately
social network was introduced. By ‘rain’ in this context I mean ‘failure’. I
have been thinking about writing this for a long time now but I decided to hold
my peace, before the Nigerian acronym for I.T.K. (I Too Know) will be directed
to me. But with all the happenings around, I guess it is really time to come
out plane with my own view of why we (students) fail so much in exams.
Taking a look at the
statistics of JAMB 2013: 1,644,110 candidates sat for the exams; with Just 10
students scoring 300 and above. And ‘we’ call these students ‘magical students’,
‘extraordinary students’-RUBBISH! We are all magical and extraordinary we just
need to put the pedal on the metal and step on the gas-we just need to read our
books! Same year 127, 017 students scored less than 159. Simply POOR!
The major reason I picked up my pen and went up to my note
pad is simply because I failed my first semester exams in the department of
Remedial Sciences UNIJOS, class of 2013 and many result were just like mine and
even more worst than my very own. I really wanted to slow down on writing this
but when I walked up to the Math 101 result of 100L students in UNIJOS the same
year, I was like : “wow, this is universal”; it was not a result to definitely
be proud of.
Students instead of doing Calculus, we are busy calculating
the number of friends we have on facebook, 2go, whats app and the number of
followers on instagram, twitter. Just to name a few. Social network have really
done us a great harm. Just some weeks back our English lecturer gave us some
work, to write an essay on: SCIENCE AND
TECHNOLOGY: THE IMPLICATION TO HUMAN LIFE. Looking at the above topic it
simply asks to label out the merits and demerits of science and technology. In
my own work I was really tempted not to add the advantages because science and
technology has somewhat done us more harm than good.
And these inventors of social networks tend not to even
notice this, they are busy updating and upgrading their networks, not their
fault though, that is what they live by, they earn through us and they do it coded-ly.
Even the phone makers are really doing very nice jobs; making bigger phones. I
do use one. From Blackberry down to Androids to iPhones, you name them. But,
seriously we are not helping our selves in anyway.
Concluding, I will want to beg every student who reads this
including me, myself and I to put more of our time into our academic works. Social
network is definitely not the way forward. Reading our books is!
