Focus

I am not smart. Since I was young, I am not a smart and intelligent person. I had gone through a lot of hardship on my young days from a lousy lazy kid who was very childish and playful. I was beaten up by both teachers and parents when I was still in my primary school. Today I would like to bring up some of my story to share my life experience about “Focus”.

As I said I am not a smart kid, I was listed number 2 in the class from the bottom. I could not score in any of the subjects except Math. I was good in mathematic since primary until my secondary, I had score all A’s on all the important Math examinations. But I always fail in other subjects especially Mandarin dictation. My class teacher will marked down 10 sentences for us to memorize and required us to pour out on the dictation day. The marking skim goes like this:

There are 10 sentences, each sentence carried 10 marks. No matter how many mistakes that you made in a sentence, the 10 marks will be gone.

I always tried to memorize all the 10 sentences and prepare myself to go for the dictation, end I only manage to get between 0 to 40 marks. Thus I always failed on my dictation. I made a lot of mistakes on Chinese word spelling especially on vocabulary. End up I will have a lot of correction work to do after the teacher passed back the dictation exercise book.

I am not a smart student, I am slow thus I took longer time than other students to do my homework. And yet I still have more correction work to be done. Sometimes I was not able to finish up the assigned homework and I was beaten up by the teacher on the next day. Teacher had increased from 3 canes per overdue homework to 5 canes per overdue homework. And teacher assumed that I was a lazy student despite a slow student.

It was even worse for my Bahasa subject in primary school. I had never spoken in Bahasa in the family and I was first get in touch with Bahasa when I was standard 1. Thus at that time, Bahasa was like an Alien language to me. My Bahasa teacher was a Malay lady that could not speak mandarin to explain the Bahasa vocabulary. My mom does not even known Bahasa and the only person that I can refer was my tuition teacher. When I was complaint by teacher to my parents I was cane for not doing my homework. I can bring back 18% examination paper to show my parents. I still remember my mom asked me “How dare you bring back 18% examination paper to show me?” and I answered her “Do you know how to answer the question paper?” She was speechless.

My disaster life ended when I met a God gifted genius call Patrick Ng. He is really a genius! He tough me “FOCUS is what you need”. We can’t study all subjects unless we are genius. Chose the subject that you want to study and focus on it. In SPM, you were required to choose 1 Bahasa, 3 elective subjects and 2 other subjects to calculate the aggregate. And the lower aggregate count you get, the better you are. Aggregate below 21 is considering grade 1. I was planning to go for Mechanical Engineering course thus I have to choose the subjects that has related with it and the subjects that I am good in. Since I am good in mathematics, I had chosen: Bahasa, M. Math, Add Math, Physic, Chemistry and English/History as my major subject to focus and I left others behind with just passing marks as C6 is good enough. End I scored 16 in aggregate on my SPM and bought me a place in a local University.

I have no tuition on my Add Math thus this subject was fully depending on my self-initiative to study. I remember there were 2 chapters that I could not understand which were vector chapter and binomial graph chapter and I left both these chapters behind and focus on other chapters. In the SPM examination there are bahagian A and bahagian B. Bahagian A consist of 10 short questions to be answered all (10 marks each) which question number 9 and 10 will be on vector chapter and binomial graph chapter respectively and I have to leave these behind. While in Bahagian B there are 6 questions (25 marks each) and we were required to choose 4 questions out of 6 to be answered which 2 of them will be on vector chapter and binomial graph chapter. Thus I had chosen the 4 questions out of vector and binomial graph chapter to be answered and made sure both Bahagian A and Bahagian B question to be answered correctly. From Bahagian A I will earn 80/100, Bahagian B I will earn 100/100. Total of Bahagian A and Bahagian B will be 180/200 = 90% = A1. This is how I score my Add Math subject in my SPM.

Thinking back on my Primary Mandarin subject dictation, if I could switch my focus attention to memorizing 5 sentences with all the vocabularies correctly written; despite memorizing all the 10 sentences, I can have 50 marks for my dictation. That will be a great start for a slow learner!