The Real Reason Some Nigerian Children Top Their Class Every Term Has Nothing To Do With Intelligence, Lesson Teachers, Or How Much School Fees You Pay

I Was That Woman Too

My name is Adaeze. I am not a teacher. I have no certificate that says I am qualified to tell you anything about how children learn. What I have is three years of the exact evenings you just read about, and one thing I found on the other side of them that I now cannot stop telling other mothers about.

It started small, the way these things do. My son was in Nursery 2, four years old, and another mother's daughter recited a whole verse from the Bible at her own birthday party, word perfect, in front of everyone. My son could not yet tell his letters apart. I clapped along with everyone else and felt something tighten in my chest that did not leave for the rest of that evening.

By Primary 1 the gap had not closed. By Primary 2 it had widened. His position moved from the low twenties to the high twenties, never once into anywhere I could be proud of on a family WhatsApp group where everyone else seemed to be posting certificates and trophies.

The emotional cost of that period is hard to describe to anyone who has not lived inside it. It was not one dramatic moment. It was hundreds of small ones. Folding a result sheet into the bottom of my bag before my husband got home. Going quiet in the family group for days at a time. Sitting in the car after open day with my hands on the wheel, not driving anywhere, just sitting there.

I tried the lesson teacher first, because that is what everyone tries first. A young man, NYSC corps member, two hours a day, four days a week. He was not lazy. He came every single day, sat with my son, worked through exercise after exercise. Eight months later, my son had moved two positions. Two. I did the arithmetic on what I had paid for those two positions and I could not say it out loud to anyone.

I tried flogging next, because my own mother had used it on me and I told myself it must work, since I had turned out fine. It worked for exactly one term. Fear is a fast fuel and a short one. By the second term he had adapted to it the way children do, and I was left with the same position and a boy who had started hiding his result sheet from me the way I used to hide mine from my husband.

I took the tablet away, because everyone said the screen was ruining his concentration. Three days of real war in my own sitting room. On the fourth day I had customers to attend to and I handed it back, and I felt like I had failed at the one thing I was supposed to be strong enough to do.

I bought more textbooks. More past questions. A second exercise book because the first one felt used up. None of it changed anything, because more material was never the thing that was missing.

I remember thinking, I was brilliant in school. So where did this child come from.

I even went for three nights of prayer with women from my church, because by then I had run out of anywhere else to turn. I am not ashamed to say that. Some of you reading this have done the same thing and have never told a single person. We prayed. We fasted. His position did not move, and I came home from the third night not knowing whether it was my faith that had failed or whether prayer was simply never meant to answer this particular question.

The chance encounter that changed things was small enough that I almost do not believe it myself when I tell it now. I was at a friend's house, and her cousin, a woman who had spent years working with children who struggle in school, was there for something unrelated entirely. My son was doing his usual thing, avoiding a book, and I made some tired joke about it. She asked me one question that no teacher, no lesson tutor, no pastor had ever asked me in three years.

What exactly is he struggling with. Not generally. Specifically.

I could not answer her. Three years, hundreds of thousands of naira, and I genuinely could not tell her what was actually broken. I could only tell her the outcome. Low position. Bad report. That was all I had ever been given by anyone, and it turns out that is not a diagnosis. It is a symptom.

She explained something to me that evening that I am going to explain to you in the pages ahead, because it rearranged everything I thought I understood about my own son. Children are not simply doing well or doing badly. There is always a specific mechanism underneath it, one of a small handful of things, and every single method I had thrown at him for three years had been aimed at nothing in particular.

I was skeptical. Of course I was. I had already spent money on people who sounded confident. But this was not a product she was selling me. It was a way of looking at the problem, and it cost me nothing to try it that first week.

I built a version of it myself, at our own kitchen table, thirty minutes a night, four nights a week. I will not pretend the first two weeks were easy. There was a night in the second week where he stumbled on something he had handled easily the week before, and my old fear came rushing straight back, the one that says none of this is working.

It was working. I did not know that yet, but it was.

By week four something had shifted that I could not explain away as luck. He answered a question at the table without me prompting him, something from nearly two weeks earlier, and the way he said it, casually, like it had always been there, made me put my pen down and just look at him for a moment.

By the end of that term his CA scores had climbed in a way they had never climbed before. Not dramatically overnight. Steadily, the way a real change looks rather than the way a miracle looks. When the report card came, I opened it in the car park the way I always did, braced for the same disappointment.

He had moved up eleven places.

I sat in that car park and cried again, but it was a completely different kind of crying than the one I had been doing for three years.

I told two other mothers what I had done, mostly because I could not keep it to myself. Both of them tried it. Both of them came back to me within weeks describing the exact same thing. The quiet evenings. The child who started asking to do the routine instead of fighting it. The report card that finally matched the child they knew was in there somewhere.

That is when I sat down and wrote everything into one place, properly, so I would never lose it and so I could hand it to any mother standing where I once stood.