When I wrote the National Grade Six Entrance Examinations, I scored 521 marks. It was called “Common Entrance Examinations” at the time. 521 marks were enough marks to land a student at the country’s most prestigious high school, Queens College, or at least, President’s College. Instead, I was enrolled at a “cowboy” school with a cutoff point of just 366 marks.
I can’t say I don’t forgive my dad for this atrocity because I do. I choose to live on the sunny side of life and look at the positive aspects of life, believing that “everything happens for the best” and “everything works out for the best,” even though I don’t always have concrete evidence of this. But above all this, I believe that God will compensate me for any wrongs done to me, and that he “gives us back the years that the locusts have eaten.” I’m a good person, and so I do forgive him, and further, I’m a believer in Christ, so I must forgive him.
My dad’s intentions in sending me to the wrong school wasn’t out of mal intent, just plain carelessness blended with stupidity. At the time when I wrote the placement exams and came out among the elite of the country, he was teaching in the Island of Grenada. He sent instructions to enroll me at “Rohan’s School,” which was Corentyne Comprehensive Secondary School (CCHS). He and Rohan were good friends going back to their younger days teaching at Manchester Secondary School, decades before. So he thought, in his simple mind, that he was doing both me and Rohan a favor by sending me there.
CCHS was located about three miles away from my home, down a long dusty road. A better option would have been JC Chandisingh Secondary which was located just one mile away from home, and was a school of much higher standard, with cut off marks of about 400.
Imagine one of the brightest lad’s in the country being placed amongst students below average! What was bound to happen, happened! Within my first few days of attending CCHS, I was traumatized at the level of intelligence, or the lack thereof, of my peers. They would play silly games, make stupid jokes, do stupid things, and one of them even made up a weird language of his own, which caught on with his peers, by adding “fu” infront of every word, and “bu” at the back of it.
On top of that, there were some remarkably illiterate teachers at the school. One by the name of Rajshree…something…didn’t even know the difference between a “motor” that powers an outboard engine, and a “motto” as in the school’s motto. She started the class one day by saying, “today” we’re going to talk about “motto” and this is not a “motto” that you use to power a boat….” Then one of the smarter students, Shahazad Abrahim, corrected her and said, “it’s motto miss, not motor.” She was our social studies teacher. She would hardly come to classes, and when she did, she would hardly do any proper teaching. Her modus operandi consisted mostly of calling out notes and letting us copy. There were some great teachers though: Sir Bheem, Sir Reb, Miss Veronica, just to name a few, but the standards at that school at the time was nothing less than traumatizing.
I suffered from the “see-saw” effect, I went from being the brightest student in the school to the bluntest in a short time. I actually attended school only 50% of the time. What was going on at the school was compounded by some things that were going on around my family circles. By the time I reached Form 4, I had lost all interest in academics. At one point, a girl from the class asked me if I could lend her a protractor. I asked her “what’s that?” She asked me curiously if I really didn’t know what a protractor is. The truth is, I didn’t, and didn’t care. When I did go to school, I would go with just one book in my bag: A biology textbook which I hardly ever cracked open. But I had a dream: to become a writer, and that dream ignited me.
