Growing pains

By Anu Dev

When my own CSEC results came out in 2011, I’d been vacationing with my family in Suriname. I learnt about it, in what is now the old fashioned way — via the newspapers. This year, the Education Minister broke new ground – she personally streamed the results of the top 52 performers who’d secured 11 or more passes with Grade Ones.

My family were avid viewers over in New York, where we were vacationing: my brother Abhimanyu had written 17 subjects at the age of 14 and “anxious” was not the word for us!!. Maybe me more than my kid brother! Abhi had always been special – and precocious. You know the saying, “You have to creep before you walk”? Well, he just dragged along on his (pampered) rump for a while and then blithely stood up and walked one day.

He started to read at the age of two and when he entered primary school at the age of six – he had to be placed in Grade Three. As his classmate Saskia Khalil recently reminisced on his Facebook wall after the CSEC results were announced, Abhi was already writing his notes in cursive at that time!

For him to enter school and skip Grades One and Two, he had to be evaluated by several officials in the Education Ministry. When he later placed 4th in the NGSA at the age of nine, the Chief Education Officer Genevieve Whyte-Nedd confessed that she’d opposed his entry – she hadn’t thought he’d be able to compete.

So Abhi, went on to Queens, and against the advice of his teachers and our parents, he decided to write 17 subjects. It’s possible he wanted to top me – who’d done 15. I’ve heard about these “sibling impulses”!!

Like me, he didn’t do any lessons, except for Spanish. But unlike me, he absolutely refused to seek assistance from our father – who I still learn from even now I’m in medical school. Forget about ME helping!! That was, and is, Abhi – fiercely independent and marching to his own drummer.

So Minister Manickchand announced the 11-plus achievers– and Abhi wasn’t on the list. We could see he was bitterly disappointed. When he was finally able to access his grades– he’d gotten 9 ones and 8 twos. Now I personally think this result was incredible – not only in absolute terms – (any 14-year-old securing 17 subjects has to be special), but because I knew Abhi didn’t really study. For sure not like how I did, three years ago.

And this is really what I want to talk about today. We hear a lot about boys not performing as well as girls and this year’s results prove that in aces – at least at Queens where the top 100 NGSA performers end up.

Among the 20 Queens students who secured 11 or more Grade Ones – not a single one of them was a boy!!! While I only have access to the Fifth Form friends who shared their Grades on Abhi’s Facebook page, it appears that he was the top performing boy this year at Queens. What is going on??

I can only report from what I saw with Abhi and his friends. Even though all of the friends went to lessons – the latter was seen as mostly a place to hang out. Then there were the other extracurricular activities – cricket, computer games – and in Abhi’s case, reading every book under the sun (and then some), but his schoolbooks. Whether it is a case of our method of imparting education is geared more towards girls (who are socialised to be more passive), or because we mature earlier – I wouldn’t be able to say definitively.

But I do know that Abhi finally buckled down during the three months his exams lasted. And I say – congratulations for doing what he did in that time!! Imagine what he and the rest of the boys could do if they hit the books like we girls did!