A time - and a notebook - for everything

 

Form 1 (1rst year of H.S.)I can't play the keys at all :)

When I see supermarket shelves filling up with school supplies, as the start of the school year approaches, I feel compassion for the parents. I remember how my sisters and I would bring back from school the list of requested notebooks, with the requirements of each teacher: “The science teacher said he wants a 400-page for class, another of 300 pages for the exercises, and another for the tests.” Multiply this by the number of courses in the program (about ten), then by the number of children in school (5 for my parents), and you will understand the puzzle that this can represent for each parent. But they dedicate themselves, hoping that these notebooks will be put to good use.

In other words, the solution could be to help the children to organize themselves, to devote a time and a notebook for each subject, including their artistic expressions. Depending on the means available to parents, they could offer a special notebook for their children's drawings / poems / thoughts, enroll them in an extra-curricular activity relating to the art that interests them, while helping them respect the time allocated to each school subject. Certainly, they will be encouraged to work better in class and out of class. And who knows if it's not through that artistic expression that they would honor their Creator and earn a living?

However, there is a class that parents do not plan. It's not in the official program, and not all students signed up for that class. The pupils concerned are often not even aware of it until the day it is revealed to them, sometimes in the middle of geography or other “not-so-funny" classes. I call it artistic expression. 

It manifests itself differently in each student. For me, it was little stories and personal reflections that I wrote on the sheets torn from my notebook. For my neighbor, they were poems written on the last pages of his notebooks. Another classmate filled his notebooks with drawings of characters with warriors looks. And all of this artistic activity often took place in the classroom, at best during break hours, but most of the time, during the class. When they discovered the torn sheets or scribbles in the notebook, parents and teachers were not happy! They would say: "So is that what you do during my class?" or " I understand now why I have to buy you a new notebook every three months!” Today, I understand parents and teachers better. When I was teaching and marking my students' notebooks, it didn't make me happy to see that the French notebook looked like a draft or sometimes a diary in which I found all kinds of thoughts. But, as a writer, I also understand the teenager that I was, and my classmates.

The problem may not be the existence of this activity, or the fact that it takes the student's attention. Rather, the problem would be when and how to do it. When I think back to my high school years, I realize that most of the artistic interests were awakening in us back then. I started devouring the books from the school library from Form 2 (2nd year of High school in Cameroon). I was also interested in the piano but I didn't have the opportunity to learn. Many boys began to learn to play musical instruments. This involved spending several hours at the music club or in choirs. Which was not necessarily to the liking of parents who were afraid of seeing us fail in class. Some ended up forbidding their children from any extra-curricular activity. My parents were just as worried about me spending more time reading adventure books than my notebooks. 

I remember that moment when my father brought in an influential uncle, and together they talked me into changing my pattern. Instead of  “one adventure book - my notebook – another adventure book”, they ask me to read my notebook, then an adventure book, and again my notebook. I don't know if I have always followed their advice but I think it was a good solution.