Aspirations

Recently I asked my students to write a piece of essay on how they arrived at their decision to be in this course and what they hope to achive at the end of their studies. Some of the essays that I received totally suprised me. They changed my views on my students, in an incredible way. Here are some of them:

1) There are two students who have no interest in the business course. They are here because they have been forced to do so by their parents. Both are planning to finish the course but still continue to fulfill their dreams of becoming beauticians.

2) There is one who aspires to expand her mom's cheongsam making business, one who wants to take over the father's furniture business and one who wants to build a chain of shops specialising in surfing equipments.

3) There is one boy who chose to study business because he was inspired by his father, a successful bussiness man in Oman.

4) And then there are a couple of them who chose to come to this college for some funny reasons (funny at least to me (: for the beautiful football field and the low car park fee.

5) There are two who wanted to be pilots and one who wanted to become a doctor but all gave up their dreams due to the sky high costs of becoming pilots and doctors and also because they were the eldest in the family and they don't want to burden their parents who also need to educate the younger siblings.

6) Finally, there is one who wants to excell in her studies because she wants to make her mom proud although her mom has been in coma for some time now.

And I tought my students are a bunch of Gen Z who are only interested in having lots of fun and only look for the easy way out in everything. This simple task became a learning exprience for me. Students are like diamonds, the harder a teacher polishes, the better diamonds the students will be.