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HAVE PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS WITH YOUR TEACHERS AND LECTURERS
This one could be very difficult for so many students. I never tried this though and most of my high flying friends never did but the best student in class did. That was the difference maker for her. Her name is Maria. She was close to every lecturer and had a good rapport with every one of them. I didn’t. My friends and I were too to our books that we were unknown to our lecturers. Our lecturers too never cared to know their students. They only cared about those who came around them.
By the time we had realized this secret, my peers and I could only come behind the girl who chose to stand head high above the rest. I am not suggesting that you go seek favors. It’s good you familiarize yourself with your lecturers so that they get to know you and associate with your capacity. Sometimes lecturers tend to assume that the students who had done well in their examination had helped themselves through some shallow means.
During my fourth year at the university, I offered a borrowed course from another department. I had failed at the test that was offered in the course. This propelled me to study hard for the examinations. I attended the lectures faithfully through the few months we had that course and I knew the lecturer quite well but he never knew me. I prepared and wrote the examination on that course with personal satisfaction and conviction that I was going to run away with an A.
Two days after the examination, the lecturer came looking for me. He asked me to see him at his office which I promptly did. Immediately, he asked that I rewrite the exams as he wasn’t sure I wrote the exams myself. I defended myself and told him I could rewrite the exams over and over again. He asked me to go seeing my confidence level. I was later told by my classmates who were closer to the lecturer that he actually wanted to fail me with the thought that I had cheated or seen the questions somehow before the examinations. He was only convinced when he asked about me from a number of my classmates who testified of my academic capacity.
I leant from personal experience that not familiarizing with the lecturer could be detrimental to my quest for academic success. I had another experience with a lecturer whose course I had to fail because he assumed I had cheated in his course to pass. I had to re-sit the examination the next year.
I’ve heard lecturers make comments such as “I never knew him or saw him in my class” even to the brightest of brains just to justify the reasons why the students should fail their course. I have also had mates who were favored just because they familiarized themselves with the lecturers. I have always suggested this to wannabe students at the university that they quest early enough for class leadership opportunities so as to have the greater chance of mingling with the lecturers and obtaining favors. This principle may not work elsewhere but in third world countries like Nigeria where everything is gotten by who you know and whose up there, opportunities as little as class leadership at the university has the capacity transform even the worse students in class the A grade students.
I am particularly persuaded by this principle because I’ve witnessed it work over and over again during my course year at the university. In our preliminary year, we had a class leader Richard who represented the class. He got favors before the lecturers and he had in his first year a gross product average of 4.56. That was in the first class cadre. My class mates and I were dazed because we were aware of his mental and academic capacity. Even the best students could not manage 3.00 but he outdid them.
We elected another leader Lawson who like Richard wasn’t a grade A student. After that year, Lawson’s grade had also spiraled from just below 3.00 to around 3.75. It was miraculous and sudden. We revolted and voted again for a new class leader David in our third year. Sadly, my class towed the same line of voting students who had low academic capacity. This was because the serious high flying students never showed interest for the position.
They were too busy to acknowledge that their academic work could have being made easier by seeking to represent the class. David too towed the same line, obtaining favors from the lecturers because he had the privilege of being close to them. His result also moved high. David wasn’t even an average student but he joined the fifteen who came through with a second class upper division result. Richard and Lawson could not make the division at the end as they lost that closeness and had to depend purely on their own work
Try to forge a positive personal relationship with your lecturers or teachers. Offer them help where you can. Even the smallest services such as giving them recharge cards, helping them wash their vehicles or taking them to lunch could help foster a good relationship. Your lecturers could even help you with knowhow to solve little problems that you may come across in your textbooks. Some lecturers love having students come around them with problems. They feel those students are the serious ones and help them with solutions to their academic problems. Lecturers also connect with those who students who try offer them one help or the other.
You need those lecturers and you need to love them too. I’ve heard many students complain that they don’t love the lecturer taking one course or the other. There have being proofs relating student performance to whether the students love their lecturers or not. Incredible results have shown that there is huge chance students will not love a subject if they dislike the lecturer.
During high school, my classmates and I had a female mathematics teacher who most of us never liked because she could not speak the English language fluently and had some other challenges. I never disliked her though. It happened that term that a class that students hardly failed mathematics became a class students could hardly get an A at mathematics. That term, only one A was produced of the thirty six students in our class.
Try always not to have a personal grudge or hatred for a teacher or lecturer. Do what you have to do and succeed where you have to succeed.