ambition vrs apathy

Its sad I know, but I live in a part of the world where, for a large part of the population, ambition and a desire to succeed is viewed with suspicion and derision.

I just had a young man come to me looking for extra revision materials for his GCSEs. Nothing untoward about that. I actually had a booklet of such material made up already for a girl the year below him. What struck me was the manner in which he asked for it.

I was in my classroom catching up on some marking after school. A shadow passed my door – then paused – then passed again. Eventually a face peered in, looked in each corner of the room, as if checking that it was completely empty. Quietly he opened the door and backed into the room checking the corridor as he went, and closed the door behind him before approaching the desk in a decidedly embarrassed fashion.

“Sir, sir, um, sir. I was wondering if you had anything I could use to revise for this exam.”

“For this exam?”

“The GCSE exam.”

“Paper 1 or 2?”

“Um, both.”

“Actually I think I may just have. Hold on till I check if I have an extra copy.”

I started to root around in my drawer for the sheaves of paper. He looked panicked and slammed a USB pen drive on my desk, shutting the drawer with his thigh as he did so.

“I was thinking you could copy the files onto this – you know – to save you any hassle.”

“Not a problem, give me a sec and I’ll do it now.”

Again the panic. He was looking at the door as much as he was looking at me now. It was obvious he didn’t want to be seen.

“I was thinking I could maybe pick them up in a bit. You’ll still be here in half an hour?”

And with that he was gone. And I was left holding a memory pen wondering what on earth had just happened.

It was simple of course. The young man, who incidentally had spent most of the three weeks I’d been teaching him with his feet on the desk pretending to sleep, wanted to pass his exam – but he didn’t want anyone to know that it mattered to him. I honestly believe that, if he’d been discovered in his English room, he would have come up with some excuse before disappearing and gone into the exam revision-material-less. His image was more important to him than his exams. Hopefully I won’t sound overly dramatic when I say that his image was more important to him than his future.

It’s a real problem here. Working in secondary schools I see it all the time – and it’s not easy to break through. Maybe it’s different in the grammar school sector with their super ambitious career students - but try getting any of the pupils here to admit that they like school or specific subjects is very difficult – getting them to admit that they want to be good at something like English is almost impossible.

The problem is they do want to be good at it. They do want to pass. They want to pass with the greatest marks ever achieved in the history of GCSEs. There is real tragedy then in the way their pride engages their logic in an horrific battle to the death; their relationship with success like the doomed potential love affair between two passing strangers in a William Trevor short story.

That student came and picked up his memory pen. When he’s gone through the notes he’ll understand what is expected of him better than he did before he read it – but whether it will be enough to make up for two years of self imposed apathy is doubtful. It may well be too late for him.

As for me – well I start doing what I can for people like the girl in the year below him. It pains me that I can’t effortlessly inspire every one of the little people - o captain! my captain! But I can’t. And I have to keep telling myself that three weeks is never going to be enough time to perform miracles. Tiny steps great journeys make... Or something like that.
Next year that girl will be sitting those exams and hopefully she, and those around her, will take more pride in their successes than their indifference. We can but hope and pray.