A reflection: On Friendships with Academic Benefits
The increasing solicitous nature of modern society is continuously facilitating the elimination of genuine social interactions among young teenage high school students, hence depriving us and themselves from the productivity in learning that can be realized when such meaningful social interactions are encouraged and nurtured among students.
In today’s society, students have taken to social media as a new way not only to network, but also to learn. Yet, from my perspective, there is little to no meaningful social interactions conductive to learning taking place in many of today’s “physical” high school classrooms. After school programs and/or initiatives that allow students to come together and forge positive relationships that can be used to boost their social and academic skills are no longer being prioritized.
These past few weeks I have been able to share, from personal experience and research, a few thoughts and observations on the state of education/learning in the US and around the world. This week, speaking from a strictly personal experience, I took some time to reflect on a particular period of my academic journey, high school, that shaped me into the scholar that I am today. Starting with the month of February, I will be visiting and interviewing with graduate programs across the country to gain admission to a PhD program in Medicinal Chemistry/Pharmaceutical Sciences. As I get ready to take my academic career to new heights, it is only right that I highlight the crucial role that the high school environment along with positive peer social interactions have played into my success until now. By sharing this particular reflection, I am hoping that my story along with my observations can and indeed will aid forge a staunch realization of how meaningful positive interactions and collaboration can be academically beneficial among young students. My hope is that any struggling student who reads this reflection can draw their own lesson and take the steps required to improve their learning process as I did.
An Enabling Milieu
From a personal stand, high school was an important period of time in my adolescence. When I was attending high school, it is at this time that I started making decisions about my course taking and future educational and career plans. It is also at this time that I started being part of different groups of friends and social circles with different interests, and when peer pressure pushed me and played the greatest in starting challenging my parents and the school officials’ authority.The influence from my peers came in both shapes: positive and negative. On the positive side, it served as an important incentive for me and my friends to perform well in school. On the negative side, the influence from my peers lead me to nonfeasance and discipline problems at times.
I attended Byimana School of Science, a high school in the East African country of Rwanda.
In Rwanda, High schools earn an understated meritory rank that is based on both: collective academic achievements and athletic performance. Schools that combine high academic excellence and athletics are honored with the title “School of Excellence”, and are coveted by students all across the country. The amazing thing is that the majority of those schools who establish themselves as excellent have the lowest school budget, the lowest tuition rates and have the least salaried teachers compared to their colleagues in the same league! How is that even possible?
As of now, Byimana is still extolled as a high school of excellence. Most high schools in the same league spend a lot of resources and efforts developing strong sports programs along academic programs; the best athletes are offered incentives in forms of scholarships and other remunerations, similar to the current trend in the United States, where schools routinely spend more money per high-school athlete than per high-school math or science student.
Unlike other such schools in their league, Byimana never invested much in developing strong sports programs, and as a result we never made ourselves a big name on the high school sports scene. Byimana’s focus was more on seeking victory from scholastic contests rather than athletic ones. After all, what signal is being sent to children, parents, and teachers about the very purpose of school when more resources are spent on sports than on academic education?
By choosing a path less traveled and through rewarding/encouraging any students , students associations, clubs and groups that prioritized academic excellence, Byimana developed a program that attracted those students who wanted to excel academically first, and use sports as a mean to exercise, teach lessons in sportsmanship and perseverance, develop school spirit, and allow them to simply have fun. This created a new breed of cool kids: the “athlete student” was no longer the norm, but the studious and academic achiever was the most laudable. Academic excellence and proficiency slowly and steadily eventually became boons most prized by students. Byimana was the new destination for the ambitious student.
The culmination
After the Rwanda Presidential Scholarship program was introduced, a program launched by the Rwandan government to reward and provide scholarships for top performing students to universities in the US, and all over the world, Byimana started ripping the benefits from its investment. Whenever results for the National Examinations that conclude High School in Rwanda were published, Byimana School of Sciences was in the spotlight: we had the top performers and had the most students who qualified for scholarship offers to US universities. I am now in the US as one of the recipient of the scholarship. As I reflect on the impact that the scholarship had on my career, I wanted to paint a clear picture of the crucial role played by Byimana’s renowned academic ecosystem in my academic success story.
During the time I attended Byimana, over 95% of students lived in boarding school while the remainder commuted. This particular setup allowed us to interact with each other and create intense friendships. During my junior year, I was part of different circles of friends: I had 9 very close tablemates, played on the basketball team, and was the leader of the high school’s boys and girls scouts club . With the different entourage came different types of interactions and needs. The one that contributed positively and the most to my academic success out of them all was the circle with my 9 tablemates. Prior to joining Byimana the year before, the 10 of us had heard of Byimana’s academic reputation, and had came from different high schools accross the country in a quest to earn a scholarship to higher learning at a top university in the US. We saw Byimana as the best way to achieve our academic dreams. However, none of us had a plan to attain such a prized goal. Over the course of our junior year, we shared breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday. We developed a deep desire to use our friendship to create something significant and helpful.
On a cold night as we were sharing dinner, one of my tablemates told us stories on how much he had read and admired the work ethics of the japanese people during the Meiji Restoration. At the end of his tales, the whole table had been inspired and fell in love with the story of the japanese. We resolved to organize in a group that will later be known as the Byimana Japanese. Our organization’s sole aim was to work hard and together to prepare for the national examinations that conclude high school, and ace them! We organized small weekend workshops, where each one of us would take a turn demonstrating or solving a chosen math or science subject that one of us struggled with. Everyone was assigned a topic, whether in math, biology or chemistry and was expected to do independent research with what resources were available to us, study it to their best understanding, and break it downs to the rest of the group. As time went on, we realized that some of us were already academically more proficient in certain subjects, and we learnt how use this diversity to our advantage. For instance, the most proficient of us would be tasked with designing simply study guides, while others were tasked with mock questionnaires for all of us to follow while preparing for tests. By the end of our junior year, we had developed more supportive and genuine relationships, and the struggling ones had a higher self-esteem when it came to academics. The following year, our individual achievements in the classroom had considerably increased, and greater productivity in terms of enhanced learning outcomes were being observed. The school supported and encouraged us by providing rooms for our weekend workshops. At the end of our senior year, 4 of us were qualified for the scholarship offers to the US. The rest were ranked well enough to receive offers to universities in Africa, Asia and Europe.
In my experience, the feeling of belonging has played a great role in boosting my performance whether at school or at work. In an adolescent’s eyes, being and feeling accepted matters more than any other aspect of life. I have had the opportunity to tutor and interact with several high school students over the past few years that I have been a tutor, and in my observations, some of the greatest challenges that today’s teen faces is a difficulty and lack of guidance in nurturing constructive relationships with their peers. Currently, we have allowed the high school teen’s relationships with his peers to be more and more superficial if existent at all; while we could exploit those relationships to deliver a more meaningful and pleasant learning experience to both the teen and the teacher. Creating school ecosystems in which students cooperate and feel accepted by their peers helps develop healthy self-esteem that can be pursued and used to foster learning.The milieu at Byimana allowed me to form more positive circles and use my friendships to to always feel comfortable and engage in learning, hence allowing me to thrive and excel academically.
Originally published at http://www.rangyclass.com/blog
