Nurture your talents when you still can

As a young boy, our parents usually dictate what you will be in life, “My son is going to be a doctor, engineer, pilot, lawyer or a professor.” These were considered to be some of the careers that came with the enviable pay cheques. Mike Tyson at early age of nine realised he had a talent in boxing as a sport during a street fight. He became undisputed world champion at the age of 20. Serena and Vanessa Williams begun playing tennis at an early age daily for two hours when they were aged three years old, they later became world chamipions.The story is almost similar with Michael Jordan who started playing basketball at an early age too. My father would have taken me to a mental hospital if I had told him that I didn’t need all the Geography, Christan Religious Education, Home Science, Art and design, Music, Woodwork in order to enjoy doing Oracle, N+, A+, JavaScript, Php, web design which is what really puts food on my table. Student X once told me that he wants to be a music producer in future but the parents would hear none of that and when I tried to intervene the parent’s response was a shocking, “Please don’t be part of my child failure but success.” She said that she had studied arts and knows that what an arts student can do a, science student can also do. She said she had ever been off duty and her immediate supervisor was a doctor who did all her work perfectly but she cannot do what the doctor does, she went on and said “you know sir you can get an arts degree online but you cannot treat patients online.” Trying to convince me that Maths, Physics and Biology was a perfect combination for her boy to do medicine in one of the prestigious university in London even though the boy had a lot of problems in passing and also understating the subjects he is undertaking not knowing that career is born in public and talent is nurtured in private.A situation also arose were a student enrolled at a university for a degree in medicine as the parents wished and worked very hard and graduated with a first class honors and top in her class. She went back home and told the parent “This is your degree I am going back to college to do B.COM (Bachelors in Commerce). “I don’t want to look for work but to look for a job,” she added. Today she is one of the top managers in a major financial institution. In summary I would appreciate if I got an opportunity to discuss with your children about what he/she wants to become in life and give him/her a chance to become it. Let us (parents) be part of the career guidance and choices our sons and daughter take in education, so that when he/she gets a job she will not pretend to work because they pretend to pay but s/he will work with passion. You can join me in believing that education is not the only key to success but one of the keys to success.The writer is a teacher at Riviera High School