By Tyler Wong
By Tyler Wong
Keep Forward
21 years ago, I opened my eyes for the first time to see what the world looked like. But that didn’ t give me a strong impression, for I continued to see different versions of the world when being brought to different places by my parents. Later, when I could crawl and step firmly on the ground to travel by myself, I could choose where I wanted to explore. The whole process of learning to walk is natural, no matter where you were born and whom you are with. At first, we cannot even undergo the easiest act of moving somewhere, until our brains and bodies slowly develop to a point where we can focus on our movements and flex certain muscles to complete the action of crawling and later walking. In retrospect, you may think that this is just some easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy thing we all have to go through in our lives. This, in fact, took months. We tried to stand up and we fell. We stood up and we fell. We walked and we fell over. But, however hard it was, we never stopped trying to walk when we were young.
There is Kin, a 15-year-old teenager whom I have been tutoring on and off for two years. He was depressed because he failed his maths and could hardly catch up with his classmates. His self-esteem was scraped off little by little every time his parents scolded him for not putting in enough effort to improve his maths scores. But he did put effort into it! He was just too behind and got discouraged. As a maths tutor, I could not do anything but keep helping with his maths by cramming our lessons with a myriad of mundane drills that had nothing to do with his well-being and enjoyment, but everything to do with the expectations of society. Society equates success with excellent academic performance. But Kin does not fit into this definition. Because his examination results in maths and a few other subjects were far from the minimum requirement to step up to the next grade, he was due to repeat a year unless he could pass the make-up examination.
Strenuously, he passed his make-up test in Form 1. But he failed again in Form 2. He took the make-up examination and luckily passed that. Then he failed again in Form 3. The fortunate events of barely passing the make-up test have never struck him as a token of competence; rather, they further upset him as he knew he was at the bottom of his class. His situation was like drowning. Even the worst of his classmates had at least a leaky wooden boat to use, and could spend tutorial time repairing these vessels. Kin was, however, in the water and struggling to get to the surface to grasp a breath of air; sometimes he did, but he then needed to swim arduously upwards again for another stream of air to survive.
MAY 2018 6