Top student trait: Believes

The National Weekender

By THOMAS HUKAHU
IN the last issue of this supplement, I discussed the top student trait of “teaching others”.
The top student will naturally be a good teacher in helping his or her peers to achieve the same enviable results that s/he obtains week after week.
The top student works hard to master concepts and in turn guides others in the path that s/he has already taken.
This week’s top student trait will be the last in this series and it will be that the top student “believes”.
That is, the top student believes that s/he can do better in whatever tests or subject that needs to be done. S/he will not be afraid of learning new skills and trying out a new line of things. S/he believes – s/he has faith that even though times are hard and there are often failures, there will be a time where the outcomes will be successful if more effort and more time is given in what they do.

The top student traits
Let me briefly recap for you the past seven “top student traits” that I have shared in past weeks.
There could be more but I decided to shorten the list to eight traits. The past seven include:
• Humility
• Starts early
• Listens and asks
• Committed
• Maximises use of resources
• Strives for perfection
• Teaches others
If you are a student who wants to become a better student, do take note of the qualities or habits that are possessed by top students, those who top their classes and schools year after year and even top their classes in universities.
The reason why some of you are not doing well as you should may be due to you not changing your habits – like humbling yourself enough, start learning with a bit more purpose as early as you can, listening to your teachers or lecturers and asking them questions to get more from them as well as completing your homework every day, as in being more committed in your work.
Your non-impressive performance may be due to you not maximising the resources available to you – your teacher, library books and relevant videos. It may also be due to you not striving for perfection in what you do or not taking the chance to help others in the subject or skills that you are good at.
If you can change some of your habits and adopt those traits as listed above, I am sure you can see an improvement.
I have shared that I grew into the subject of mathematics quite late – as when I was in Grade 12. If I did not make up my mind at that age to spend one hour a day on the subject, I would not have done well in it as well as my other science subjects.
I was willing to make the change upon a teacher’s suggestion regarding my too-relaxed study habits and that changed the world for me. It opened up many opportunities for me later in jobs and assignments within and outside the country.
Blackberry co-inventor Mike Lazaridis used to say that what got him into engineering and communication devices was a science teacher mentioning that communication technology was vital for tomorrow’s world.
Keep your ears and eyes open. You can learn a lot from people around you, including your teachers and lecturers, your guardians or experts who speak on radio or TV shows. Learning from them is as important as learning content for a textbook to prepare for an exam.

A Bible example of the need to use talents
Many people and authors talk about this top student trait, that a successful person is someone who “believes” s/he can do it.
Most of them say the successful person must believe in himself or herself. I do not agree with that. I say “the successful person is someone who believes in the talents he has been endowed with as well as the experiences s/he has come through in life”.
Christians believe that their talents and gifts are God-given and they believe that those are to be used, or developed.
Jesus’ story in the Bible about the three servants being given different amounts of “talents” by their master who was travelling to a far country can teach us a few things (as told in Matthew 25: 14-29).
Two of the servants made use of the talents while one hid them. The word “talents” that we use today in describing our abilities originate from this story.
A source tells us that in Jesus’ days, a talent was not a coin, but a unit of a high value. If a denarius was worth a day’s wages, a talent would have been worth about seventeen years’ wages. A reference to a large number of talents generally meant “a great deal of money,” much the same as when people today say, “if I had a million dollars.”
So from the parable, the first servant was given five talents and he obtained five more, the second was given two and he made two more. The last however buried his.
When the master returned he praised the first two and assured them of promotion, among other things. However, he chided the third servant and called him “wicked and slothful”.
Moreover, the master implied that what belonged to the third servant would be taken from him and given to others.
A number of things we can learn from this story is good people use what they have and bad people do not – they hide what was given them. Moreover, those who are given stuff are required to make good use of those by people who gave them.
One day they will have to give a report on how they used their talents.

Believe in what you are blessed with
Let me reiterate my point on believing.
We are all talented in some things. For some of us, we are almost natural with certain skills, and for others we worked hard to be where we are.
However, the right way to look at the tests and trials ahead is not to believe in yourself but believe in what talents and abilities you possess and the experiences you have accumulated over time.
The story of Boy David in the Bible is a favourite. It shows why I say “a top student believes in the abilities or talents he was endowed with as well the experiences he had gone through”.
You can read of David being anointed by Prophet Samuel in I Samuel 16 and the battle with Goliath in I Samuel 17.
The story was that boy David left his home in Bethlehem and his work of minding sheep and went to the Valley of Elah where the armies of the Philistines and Israel gathered to do battle.
His father had sent him with food for his older brothers (Eliab, Abinadab and Shammah) who were also enlisted as King Saul’s soldiers.
But there was a problem there. The Philistine giant Goliath who stood at over 3 metres dared an Israelite to fight him and suggested that the outcome of that one-on-one duel will determine which of the two armies should be victors of the battle and be allowed to rule over the other.
David was at Israel’s camp when Goliath made the call to the Israelites as he did days before. Logically, all the Israelite soldiers were afraid of going out to do a one-on-one duel with the giant.
That was when David decided that he would take on the Philistine champion. As he saw it, it was God’s assignment for him.
Incidentally, Eliab, David’s brother, chided him for talking to the other soldiers about the battle.
Did David listen to his brother? No, because he knew that was a job that needs to be done immediately.
When David approached King Saul with his plan to go fight the Philistine, he was also scolded by Saul. He was seen as just a boy.
But then David told the King the story of his experiences – of him fighting and killing a lion and then a bear which came to kill a sheep from his father’s flock.
Saul then tried to arm the boy with his armour and weapons but David said “I cannot go with these; for I have not proved them”. That is, “I am not used to them” – and the boy stuck to the sling and stones, weapons that he had used in previous battles.
A couple of things we can learn from David’s story included the fact that he knew “he was endowed with something”, he was anointed, he was chosen by God.
His abilities were God-given and he was going to use them, not hide them in a pasture back in Bethlehem.
He also knew his experiences in past exams or tests (fighting with a lion and a bear) warranted him for this battle, one that all the soldiers of Israel were afraid to fight.
Thirdly, David did not listen to his older brothers. He knew that in some instances the well-meaning relative may not be the best advisor for an assignment.
Fourthly, David stuck to what he knew worked best for him in a battle, the sling and stones would do.
I hope you learn similar lessons too as a student.
Top students believe in what talents and abilities they possess (as in God giving those to them), the experiences they have had as well as resources and plans they have tried and have had success in completing past assignments.
May you also learn the same too to become better in what you study.

Start somewhere to be a top student
Let me end this article with this: We are all good at something. We must work to develop them because God (or nature) has selected us to be good at that.
This talent or ability may be brought to your notice by someone mentioning it to you or in the tests you do in school where you seem to be quite a natural in mathematics or working with words, as compared to your peers.
In David’s case, Samuel’s anointing him as well as his success in protecting his father’s flock from a lion and bear gave him confidence in taking on an enemy giant.
At times you will have to make up your mind to become the best in a chosen field because you choose to, not because of a relative or teacher talking to you.
As a schoolboy, British mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton was unhappy with a school bully and wanted to beat him in schoolwork and that turned Newton from being “just another student” to become a “top student”.
It is also said that in Newton’s genealogy there was never a mathematician or scientist. He was like a genius born into the family of ordinary people.
That points to the fact that a good genealogy is not everything in life, someone’s choice can determine success regardless of the circumstances.

Tribute to my guardians
I end this series of articles on top student traits with an acknowledgement of my parents, Paul Hukahu (Snr) and the late Clara Hukahu.
I was very privileged to have been born into a family where the first two adults I knew were educators, teachers back in the 1960s and 1970s.
Even though life was tough for them, as when my mother suffered from a form of schizophrenia, they taught my siblings and me a lot about education and the need to be good at what you do.
My father emphasised that we must read and bought us books and comics when he took us into news agencies back in the 1970s. (I used to read his novels too when I had nothing to read, books like Exodus by Leon Uris.)
My mother on the other hand taught us that you can actually fall in love with algebra and work with it as if it was music.
May you learn from your guardians and people close to you too.
Keep your eyes and ears open and learn and work to become a top student.

  •  Thomas Hukahu is a teacher and freelance journalist.