Fail in school, good for you.

I wrote this post and about to publish it somewhere else. But since i wrote it, then I will just post here then :)

Failing in school is Good for you.

Just this week, I finally received my examination results after waiting about 1 month for it. To my surprise, I got an F grade for a subject. F in my result slip doesn't reflect Fantastic, Fabulous or First Class. F means fail. I stared at the F for a while, wondering how on earth can I see an F in my result slip? The last time I did see an F is about 10 years ago, when I get an F in secondary 1, for my Literature. :P

Like many other students, I just couldn't' accept the fact that I failed a subject in school. Who wants to fail? Failing means that we have to read the subject again, go for the same lectures again, and spend another 2 hours to go for the exam - again.

After feeling down for hours, a thought come to my mind. A failure is not that bad after all! In fact, failing in school is good for you. You may see that I might be joking here, or suffering from some post-examination stress that I come up with this illogical logic.

But after you reach the end of this article, you might think otherwise.

First of all, do you know we people fail everyday? We do fail to wake up the time when our alarm clock ring. We do fail to cook the half-boiled egg we want. And we do fail to obey our parents too. We can fail, however, we know that we have to face the consequence after that. We might end up late for classes, swallow our uncooked egg, or have a curfew set by our parents.

But failures in school does not seem to be that simple, like those failures mentioned above. We can accept all the consequences for failing those daily tasks, but the consequences of getting a fail grade in school might not be that acceptable by most of us (including me!).

The price to fail in school is far greater than those daily tasks. On top of just retaking the exam again, we might risk spending an additional year in school, we might be excluded from our scholarship, or worse, we might even drop out of school. So in a sense, failing is normal if we fail in those daily tasks, but becomes abnormal if it is about our school grades.

Unfortunately, many youths and students have decided to end their lives when they see failures in their school grades. This is an increasing trend, and not just in Singapore, but in other countries like China and United States too.

And some times it is not that these students have been failing terribly in school for years. It is just that they experience their first failure for the first time in their schooling years. Imagine seeing an F among all the As and Bs that you have achieved for the past 10 years of your school life. It can be a massive shock or disappointment to some students.

Nowadays, our youths have been conditioned to think that academic grades are the only decisive factor for success in life. It is either excellent grades, or a dark future. However, we all know of many great man and woman who succeeded in life even if they fail in school. Some of them even didn't go to college!

No, I'm not telling people not to go to school, or go drop out of school and then you'll be another Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, but let's learn how to handle failures in every aspect of our lives when it comes. We can overcome any failures or setback in our lives, as the saying goes, a setback is a setup for a comeback.

So as my article is titled 'Failing in school is Good for you', I want to tell you that if you fail in school, you have a failing experience that others don't have. If you overcome this failure, you have gained another experience of overcoming a failure, which others don't have! Failing is Okay! (But if you fail continuously, then it's not Okay, as it just means that you have not learn your lesson :P)

After writing this, it may seem that I write this article to encourage myself, or to justify why failing is good, and why getting too many As in school is not. But honestly, I'm still quite upset to see a F in my report card, when I'm used to seeing higher grades in it, but what's next for me is just to work harder next time.

Have you failed in something but haven't get out of it?

Come, let's accept it, and stand up again, together.