"Shut up and think."
(Reposted from Yong Sheng's blog)
"We got our A level results back today, after a week of BMT brewing with understated anxiety. I performed as probably was expected of me, and as I had expected. So there weren’t any sensational surprises there. People received their results slips, containing magazines of ‘A’ grades and the occasional ‘B’ grade. Some tears: one ‘B’ dotting the page; in some cases two. Some slip-ups: a ‘C’ here, a ‘D’ there. The hall was muted in buoyant expectation: conditional offers to Oxbridge, Ivy Leagues, scholarships, etc. were met, and many beamed. Jiahui(, Ren Yan) and I were interviewed by the New Paper for our work in VFC. We knew our results early, from the staff. We just smiled when we were told.
There is a problem. It’s not with us; it’s how we think, and how we are conditioned to think. You see, in that hall, when we were cheering for the top scorers (and btw, congrats to Nigel, Barry and Kaushik for topping the cohort) and shouting for the inevitable grade improvements that the school somehow makes every year, we tend to forget that outside that hall it’s not the same. We forget that that hall where we congregated to get our results is a community of marsupials, hidden and shied away from an overwhelmingly different reality in the mainland. We remember our admission deadlines and rehearse our interview speeches for scholarships and colleges, but forget that a radically different shift is happening elsewhere. We smile and our hearts silently go “well done” when we receive straight ‘A’s; we forget that when someone else in another hall receives an ‘A’, it is quite a different reaction. In this hall, we whisper our scholarship choices to one another, comparing who got where and why and how; when, in another hall, others would have be shouted with glee for gaining acceptance into a local uni.
This isn’t a guilt trip. To those with good results, well done you. You never have to feel guilty about genius; we should never be persecuted for perfection. But we could recall that our vocabulary and discourse, especially when discussing results, should be sensitive to a majority of candidates here and elsewhere who might not obtain straights. Raffles scored well. 2 in 5 of us scored 4 ‘A’s, and almost 3 in 4 of the cohort received 3 H2 ‘A’s. But what of us who belong to the flip side of the fraction, who saddle into sadder statistic: those of us who don’t clap along when the our principal announces that 99.2% passed the A levels, those who don’t make much noise when they receive the results, those who don’t really react to insincere pats-on-the-back by friends who on the highway to Harvard, those who go home and bleed tears.
We could recall our thinking. It’s not natural to study 4 H2 subjects; it’s not normal to apply overseas. It’s not an entitlement, either. No one owes us anything; you owe yourself everything. Those who scored less could well have done far better had they the same opportunities as you had: the same parents, upbringing, teachers, environment, house, government, culture, religion. There are people who pray for a BBC to qualify for NUS.
You are better, but you could have been no better. You might have fulfilled the offer for the scholarship or the college, but you might not have had done so, if your life been aligned in a different manner. So shut up, and think."