Shyness Mocks My Ability To Make Friend

Dear Agatha,

I enjoy your column and love the way you help people. I hope you can help me too. I am a final year law student, who will be 22 years come April.

My problem is that due to my shyness as well as my strict up bringing, I haven't been able to make friends, except in school. I wonder if you could help me.

Adaeze.

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Dear Adaeze,

There is no magic about making friends. That you have been able to nurture friends through school; it means you have what it takes inside of you to be friends. The only thing you haven’t been able to do is to take your friendships out of the school settings.

Friendship is essentially about having something in common. You and these colleagues of yours have something that binds. Look at who among them you would love to have as a friend. Chances are that most of them would have loved to change the status of your association to something more fundamental but seem to be scared by the invisible wall you appear to have unconsciously erected between you and others around.

You have to bring down the wall you have erected to make it easier for those wishing to be friends with you to cross over. It is called meeting people midway. It simply takes a simple sentence like ‘how are you’? What a nice outfit or smile you have got to change the status of friendship from causal to something more enduring.

Friendship understands that we all have needs for each other at every point in our lives. It is also about being sincere, unconditional in our relationship, loyalty as well as patience to ignore. To be a good friend, you have to learn first to be a friend to yourself. When you know how to treat yourself right, you will learn how to treat and respect your friends.

Good luck.

Craving For Exam Success But Not As Cheats

Dear Agatha,

I am 16 years, still in SSS 2 as a student. My problem is that I have classmates who cheat to pass their examinations, while I don’t cheat but end failing the exams.

I am confused. Do I take to cheating to pass like all my classmates or continue to endure the humiliation of failure because I abhor cheat?

David.

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Dear David,

Don’t allow your situation push you into something you don’t want, and which would bring shame to your family. That your friends are doing it and getting away with it doesn’t make it right. After a while, it would become a way of life for them and overtime would become obvious to discerning minds that they lack the intellect to defend whatever certificates they are parading. I am sure you want to be able to defend whatever grades you make.

Trust me, your F grades have more honour than the A grades they parade. Even though they don’t make you happy or smile, you have dignity in your ability. You can hold your head high among them knowing that your results reflect your true ability and tell you areas to put more concentration.

The lesson from your failures is simply for you to do well and not to encourage you to cheat like all your friends. In life, there is no shame in failing; the wise use the opportunity of such falls to stand again, to refocus on the essential things of life. Only the unwise allow the pains of failures to bar further attempts to rise.

You must be determined to pass on your own merit. And you can only achieve this by reading and studying your books, with passion and interest.

To help you understand why you are failing your examinations, think of why you cannot seem to retain anything you are taught or you read? Is the atmosphere at home conducive enough? Are you disturbed about something? What thoughts keep popping up in your mind while reading? You must realise that studying requires absolute concentration and faithfulness to yourself.

Therefore, you must ignore everything happening around you whenever you are reading. Passing your examinations should be the only thing on your mind, occupying your time at that time. Even if your home is in third world war, develop the steeliness of mind to ignore and concentrate on your studies.

At your age, it is very easy to get distracted by so many things. If your home isn’t the problem, peer influences could as well be. Having friends who believe in cheating their ways to pass examinations isn’t encouraging and could work against taking your studies more serious.

This is because the natural spirit of positive competition is absent between you and your friends; hence you have nobody among your classmates to stimulate you to optimum performance.

But if you see your education as your passport to greater things in life and passing on your own without help or cutting corners as your credibility test, you will learn to apply yourself more to your education through proper prioritisations.

One thing you should get very clear is, irrespective of the general norm that acquisition of knowledge never goes out of fashion, and it isn’t always true in all cases. Primary and secondary school education have time frames attached to them. If you don’t concentrate more efforts at passing your examinations now, few years down the road, all zeal would have been lost because this is still the uniformed stage of education. You need to pass this stage credibly well to get to the stage of liberty.

All you have to do is to plan your time. Right from the beginning of the term, begin to create time for revision, for you to go through your class work. The first months may be difficult for you but after a while, you will get it right. Don’t wait till examination day before you read. Also avoid cramming, instead study to understand. This way it would be easy to put what you have read down in your own words. More often than not students run into problems when they want to impress teachers by giving them back ‘word for word’ what they were taught in class.

Answering questions in your words shows that a lot of time went into preparing for the examinations. The absolute subjects like Mathematics, you must however concentrate efforts on them, so that you will grab the idea well.

Being an average student, concentrate not on getting all A grades, but average grades to get you going.

This may take a while but at the end, you will begin to pass your exams effortlessly. And what more, your friends would be forced to acknowledge you because unlike them, they know that yours is through hard work and not cheating.

Good luck.