Third anniversary competition: announcing the contenders!

We want to thank everyone who wrote in. Of all our entries we have narrowed the search to the top three essays. For the next three weeks we shall publish all three in no particular order and then we shall announce the first second and third prizes in the fourth week. All of the essays […]

We want to thank everyone who wrote in. Of all our entries we have narrowed the search to the top three essays. For the next three weeks we shall publish all three in no particular order and then we shall announce the first second and third prizes in the fourth week. All of the essays we are publishing teach us a thing or two about reading, engaging young persons and providing the requisite tools to get our social media obsessed children to turn to books. There are lessons also for everyone about how to reboot your reading habit. Each essay is a collector’s item. Enjoy!

Our first of the top three entries is from PTA/NADP International School, Lafia, Nassarawa State.
READING, A PANACEA FOR EFFECTIVE EDUCATIONAL TRANS FORMATION.

By Okpe Samson Eche        
PTA/NADP International College, Lafia        
English language/literature teacher

Reading, according to Wikipedia is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols in order to construct or derive meaning. Atabo S.Y. opines that the first and the widest experience which children get about the world outside their environment is gotten through books. This is because there is an imaginary and intellectual travel when children read books. John Keat lived for 25 years but before he was 18 he had this to say in his imaginary travel in “On First Looking into Chapman Homer”
Much have I travelled in the realms of gold
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in frailty to Apollo hold . . .

This therefore means that the likelihood of children travelling to any part of existence in their reading is a possibility. This existence is not limited to cities and forests; fallow lands and deep water but wherever the scene of the story is set. In view of these aforementioned facts, PTA/NADP Int’l College is aimed at harnessing effective reading practices, skills and creativity of her students. The school has built a standard and well equipped library to facilitate reading. The students are spurred to read different novels, play and poems written by African and non-African authors. Prominent among them are Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiong.O, Alfred Tennyson, Wole Soyinka, Williams Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, John Donne, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickson, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, George Owen, Oliver Goldsmith, Bernard Shaw, J.P. Clark, Lewis Nkosi, J.C.de Graft, Athol Fugard, Ola Rotimi etc.
Concrete enlightenment concerning the indispensability of reading coupled with the ideas of literary criticisms is fully integrated under the tutelage of the literature teacher. To this respect, the literature teacher has instituted a slogan of Nancy Kline thus: “withholding information from somebody is an act of intellectual imperialism. Not bordering to seek information is an act of intellectual recklessness”.
Nowadays, students are attracted to social media thus hardly read. The data released during the launch of the present administration’s BRING BACK THE BOOK INITIATIVE (17th May 2013) shows that 80% of the populace has turned away from reading, most youths within school age only read to pass exams. It is not hyperbolic therefore, to say that the numbers of youth with earphones, the ones frequenting television viewing centres and those addicted to playing computer games and the likes are overwhelming. Hence, PTA/NADP Int’l College once in a while organizes a speech competition titled: Social Media, a Menace to our Educational System.
The students engaged in a fierce battle of articulation in favour and against the proposition. The aims and objectives of the debate were tremendously achieved as students acknowledged and embraced the need to have less time for social media and give reading and creative writing a pride of place.
The school has been participating in different external programmes/ exercises featuring writing, spelling and reading competitions. Worthy of note is the catalogue of laureates the school has recorded following all these competitions. The recent one organized by the Association of Nigeria Authors (ANA) held on 16th-17th October 2013 at Science School, Lafia was a historic presentation of its own as the school was among the first runners up.
The school PTA/NADP Int’l College has severally invited reputable academics and organizations for seminars and talk shows on the same vanguards. The recent one was presented by an NGO known as Shelter Life Environmental Initiative in June 2013; the topic was READERS ARE LEADERS. The English language teachers have initiated principles of getting students acquainted with learning and picking new words for writing essays of different types. In the same vein, teachers ensure that students’ essays appropriately constitute at least 15 new words.
Apart from teaching vocabulary development, synonyms, antonyms, ambiguity and other related semantics, the literature master has put in place drama club where students participate actively in dramatizing literary materials.
In bringing this essay to conclusion, the words of Dr D.W. Manezak are worth reckoning:
As the pages of books are turned, a child’s world is broadened. Literature is valuable for many reasons; it sparks children’s creativity and imagination, introduces them to new people, places and ideas; build their vocabulary and strengthens their use of language, clarifies difficult situations and troublesome feelings. In fact, books help children reach out to the world beyond home and community and perceive an ever expanding array of possibilities.
Manezak maintained that orientation towards books and stories during the formative years create pleasant, happy experience into adulthood. There is no gainsaying that personality is the quality of a person’s character, making him/her interesting, attractive and somewhat noticeable. The school, PTA/NADP Int’l College is resolute to bringing these goals and objectives into fruition.