"Imagine this. A boy in class four is standing all alone in front of his school gate. He is waiting for his parents to pick him up. Suddenly he notices one of his classmates to also be standing near him, just on the opposite side of that gate.He thinks, "I should go talk to him. He looks pretty lonely standing there all by himself. I should give him some company." So he approaches him and asks, "Hey, are you also waiting for your parents to come?" But he doesn't get any reply.
That classmate doesn't even look at him. So he nudges the classmate, "Hey!" Then finally he gets an answer. "My mom said you are a bad student and I should never talk to you. Now can you just leave me alone?" Can you imagine how terrible this little boy felt? How worthless and insignificant? I can. Because that little boy was me.
My childhood is filled with stories like this and this one is the one I specifically remember. It all started when I started going to a new school in class three. I couldn't adapt to that school's environment and started failing.
So my results in class three were very poor. In most schools in Dhaka, your roll number is given based on how you did in class the year before. So next year, I had one of the last roll numbers in my class.
Most of my classmates avoided me. Many of them were instructed by their parents to do so. "If you become friends with him, you'll also start failing," the parents used to say.
The situation remained the same for the next two years. I thought I had to leave that place somehow, I had to go somewhere where people aren't defined by their merit positions. When I got into a cadet college in class seven, I was happy. In cadet colleges, you have one cadet number and that cadet number becomes your identity for the rest of your cadet life.
Also, being a boarding school, it did not have toxic parents to teach their sons how to discriminate based on school results. Everyone helped me there.
So, somehow that failing student from class four is studying in BUET now. But that feeling of worthlessness I got in my childhood, it never left me. Sometimes I try to imagine what BUET would be like if our student ID was changed every term based on our CGPA. That sure is a scary thought. Thank god that is not the case!"
Humans of BUET, Fb
Latest News