A Journey at the University of Brighton

When she first joined the University of Brighton, several years back, she was a not-so-innocent but emotional young adult. Her charming spirit was the punchline for anyone who dared doubt her ability to be the best mathematics there ever was in her neighbourhood. Today as she reflects, she just has one word for anyone who walks into campus to be trained as a teacher. “Beware,” she says.

My Ha, may have undergone a thrilling four years in Brighton. Perhaps even her former self before joining campus may be a thing of the past, but she managed to reserve enough of it to see her through the first few years of teaching career. She says, “every time I walk into the classroom full of expectant children, eager to learn, I force myself to be the girl that was before Brighton happened.”

When My Ha joined the University of Brighton she never bothered much to choose friends carefully as her mother had cautioned. She championed herself as being able to convert any soul into her own likeness. But as time would tell, she found herself being dragged down the drain.

Campus life is well known to be on high octane. Year one and you are already dragged into freshman’s bashes and night parties. She recalls that on the very first night and for the first time in her life, she had seen through three parties on and off campus. All through My Ha had drunk just enough to recall the activities of the long night. “A little freedom is not bad for the spirits, eh?” she recalls her first male friend on campus, who would later turn to be her sophomore boyfriend, saying.

Weeks later and having made a couple of friends both within the school of education and without, she would be invited to parties, go on a hike, check out the “hottest” campus boys and “all the silly things that girls do on campus,” she says smiling and perhaps relishing the moments. But slowly and unconsciously, she was losing her humane touch. The sense that always turned a crying, bullied boy in primary school into a handsome courageous man. It was in sophomore year that she realised how fast things may have turned.

One evening, she recalls, trolling down the streets of her residence with ‘the squad’, a group of her girlfriends just as notorious as the American squad of four congresswomen (at least for them it is for a good cause), she did what no empathetic teacher could ever do. Having found a young girl crying seemingly her clothes indecently pulled off, she shouted to her, “was it one of your many sweethearts or did you try to steal another one? Anyway, it was long coming at least you’ve got another chance to steal somebody’s boyfriend.” The squad burst into laughter all the way through to the residence.

Two days later, the same girl would walk to My Ha and tell her that she was never raped but that everything she said that evening was so mean that it hurt more than her friends who had violently kicked her out of a hired car to a party. At that lone moment, My Ha realised that she had not only lost the battle for friends but was fast losing the war meted on her character. She was in her third year in college.

Still, the peer pressure from her friends and her computer science boyfriend would make all that go away. “A little evil is not bad right? What would someone tell her children about campus life?” she says jokingly and continues, “at least we later got to be friends with the girl for all the bad reasons.”

Now a senior student at the university and with a very bright boyfriend in a top notch course, My Ha got too sure of herself to suggest running for a student leadership position. A self-styled teacher, her campaign management comprising of ‘the squad’, found the best tag in Archimedes, “Give My Ha a place to stand and she will move the earth!” In campaign mode her friends were treating her like the dragon queen in the Game of Thrones. Too sure of herself, she even stopped replying to messages by classmates and had that done by her personal assistant. Well, it ended in tears.

It was in her final year that she finally woke from the proverbial little slumber. She says joining the peer counselling club albeit too late helped her brush off the dust that had accumulated on her forsaken character. At least having the confidence to walk to the girl she had humiliated and to formally apologise for her words.

My Ha recalls with a sense of pride that even though she had built a mad house in the years in Brighton University, her last action in the months towards final exams had brought an implosion of character so unfit for a teacher.

Asked whether high school graduates should be taken through an on-campus reality check, My Ha suggests that the on-campus tours given by colleges can only tell you so much of a college student’s life. Real college life tour should be given by those that experience it not those that run it. “Perhaps they should put a disclaimer; everything isn’t what it seems to be,” My Ha says in her bubbly face that she adopts when teaching mathematics.

To be the good teacher she is today, My Ha has re-imagined herself to be someone who can be emulated by the young ones she teaches without giving them false hope. If her experiences at Brighton University were a person, they may have intended the worst out of teacher My Ha but she still was on the driver’s seat and she never disappointed herself. Whereas her students may not see it in her mathematics lessons, My Ha sees herself at the centre of moulding the future of the world with an obligation to prepare not just the mind but also the heart of the future generations. To My Ha experience isn’t always the best teacher, others have to do it for the future generations.

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