The Poor Student’s Secret to Passing WAEC, By Ibraheem Dooba, PhD
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The Poor Student’s Secret to Passing WAEC, By Ibraheem Dooba, PhD
Here’s the lesson I learned from a school driver with 17 children. Indeed, he taught me a lot of things (including modifying my perception of people with many children) but I’m going to share one of them in this chapter. To reciprocate his generosity and wisdom, I also taught him one hack to make his life easier.
It was the morning that we were going on a journey with him. When he came to fetch me at home, I congratulated him over the achievement of his son; because a couple of weeks before, I saw a picture he posted on social media celebrating his son who had just completed the memorization of the entire Qur’an.
“There’s more,” he told me, “that boy is now studying medicine.”
I was impressed. In the competitive world of medical sciences, it’s not easy for even the children of the rich, who study in elite secondary schools, to get in. Let alone students who go to public secondary schools.
But he told me his secret. “When my children finish secondary school, I send all of them to do IJMB in Funtua.” The IJMB is a two-year A’ Levels programme. Some of my friends did it before going to the university.
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But the interesting thing is that this gentleman doesn’t send his children to IJMB so that they can get admission into the university with the result. No.
Indeed, none of his children has ever used the certificate to gain admission – including the medical student in the family.
“I send them to IJMB to be hard-boiled,” he told me in Hausa.
What did he mean by that?
He feels that the education they receive from secondary school is not enough. Therefore, he is using the IJMB to consolidate and reinforce the knowledge so that the children can be fully baked. So when they go to IJMB, they do JAMB and because of the additional preparations, his children pass with high scores.
I thought this was a very nifty strategy and I told him so.
“But do you want me to tell you an even easier strategy to use?” I asked him.
“It is also cheaper and faster because you wouldn’t need to bake them with IJMB” I added.
Of course, he was interested. I told him that for a poor student who can’t afford an expensive private school, he can go to a poor school and still do as well or even better than those who go to expensive private schools.
You see, students going to private schools access resources (both human and material) that public school students lack. They also get exposed to a world and a network that can help them in the future.
Other than that, the rest is exam preparations. Yes, the most important role the schools play is to ready the students for exit examinations such as WAEC, NECO, Cambridge IGCSE, NABTEB and JAMB. Doing well in these examinations is the achievement that both teachers and parents celebrate.
Of course character matters, but while schools buy newspaper pages to advertise their achievements in these examinations, they don’t do the same to celebrate character. Parents also don’t feel a school has done its job if children graduated with a good character but failed WAEC.
“So if the main focus of expensive schools is passing examinations,” I told the transport officer, “you can do what the best of them do.”
“What’s that?” He asked.
“Get the past questions booklet for all the subjects. And get your children to answer all the questions. The books contain up to 20 years of past questions. If they don’t understand a concept, they can rush to YouTube where millions of teachers are waiting to teach them for free. When they can answer all the questions for a particular subject twice, they can guarantee themselves an A1.”
“There’s a company that even makes it easier,” I continued. “It publishes a series titled “Hidden Facts” which organizes WAEC, NECO and NABTEB questions topic by topic. So for example, if a student finishes learning figures of speech, he can attempt 20 years of past questions on the topic before moving to the next.”
With this simple strategy, if a student is willing to put in the work, she can achieve the type of results students in private schools get – without paying a ton of cash. While this strategy is a good thing. It also exposes the poor student to the reality that he no longer has any excuse for failing exams.
PS:
This is a chapter from the book, “The Secret of Straight-A Students” by Ibraheem Dooba.
PPS:
I’m not affiliated with Hidden Facts series but I’m recommending them because what the publisher did is brilliant. Indeed, I commissioned our teachers to do the same thing but one of them informed us that someone else (Hidden Facts) had already executed what we were trying to achieve.
