Type II Outlier

When I was in primary two and three, I had a classmate. I can’t remember his name anymore, but his face strikes me as a Segun. So, we’ll call him Segun. Segun was quite poor academically, based on whatever standards the school I attended used. I wasn’t. He was slow to grasp, again based on the way we were being taught. I wasn’t.

One time, the teacher instructed the class to bring two oranges and some sugar the next day. “We’re going to make an orange drink, like Fanta’, Uncle Bassey said. Some of us turned up at school the next day without the items, but Segun had the entire class upturned. As we submitted the oranges into the collection bowl, Segun pulled out a 25cl bottle of Fanta (I don’t think they still make those) from his backpack and handed it in. We laughed! We jeered, and we mocked. I laughed, I jeered, and I mocked.

“Segun you’re supposed to bring oranges so we can make an orange drink like Fanta, not bring Fanta. Mumu boy”.

In retrospect, we weren’t laughing because Segun had made a mistake. We did because Segun was fulfilling our idea of him being a dunce. We teased and condemned Segun so much. We were taught to believe that he was dull, and we believed that he was the reason for his own problems. We did this so much that he came to believe it himself, that one day in primary three, Segun stood in front of the class, his hands over his head and he said out loud, “I have spoilt my life”. Tears flowed freely down his cheeks too; and for the first time since I had known Segun, I became undecided about who or what he was.

See, I thought I had Segun figured out. Well, I thought my teacher did, and my teacher couldn’t have been wrong, right? Yet in that moment, Segun didn’t appear dull. He was just a boy who had come to believe what the teacher said. And these days I wonder if Segun believing that he was a dunce because the teacher said so, was him being a dunce. After that episode I still believed he was a dunce, but only with my head. My heart was free from that illusion.

There was another day. This time the teacher asked us to create the image of a one-naira coin (We definitely don’t have those in circulation anymore) in our notebook. Everyone got to work. I was going to wow my mates and teacher with a well-detailed drawing. I don’t know where Segun got the idea from, but he had placed the coin under a leaf of his note and was shading away. After he was done, he put a circumference around it, and it was the perfect one-naira coin.

Segun may not be cut out to be a great physician or pharmacist, but maybe the reason he brought that bottle of Fanta to class was because he had no time for imitating something that had already been created, and perhaps it’s the same reason why he didn’t spend time illustrating a one-naira coin. Segun is likely that one staff you need in a recession when your business can’t break even, or the engineer who is going to stop the SpaceX Dragon from exploding at launch. The scary bit is that Segun may never know the reason why he did those things or why he was that way.

So maybe I’m not big on celebrating Teacher’s Day. It’s not because I don’t appreciate the lessons and commitment to raising the next generation. I do, I even appreciate the strokes. Well, some of them. Okay, none of them. But every time I think of things this way, I think of myself as a good product of a flawed system.

I don’t know where Segun is today or if his name is really Segun, but that boy was an outlier and I hope for his sake that when he left our school, he met better people than us.