The past weeks have been quite busy for me. From summer parties to workshops, to lab work to deadlines etc. In the midst of all these activities, I have had sweet conversations, some of which I would be sharing with you as soon as I pen them down. I would start with the most recent interesting talk I had with a friend. It seemed like the season of internships in her office and they had a total of five new interns for the summer. She was saddled with the responsibility of mentoring three of them directly and she totally enjoyed it. As she went on with her conversation about the interns at her workplace, the conversation soon focused on the attitude of the different interns to work. She complained about one of the girls who was so sweet, respectful and loving but who might end up not learning anything - her reason was simple. Homegirl was too busy running errands and cleaning up after others that she almost had no time to do quality work. This story reminded me of my days as an i...
My Iranian friend usually makes the mistake of referring to a male as 'she' and vice-versa. As usual, she offers an apology (which I do not consider necessary) and corrects her mistake. She had shared with me in the past that the Persian language had no gender designation and it got me thinking about the Yoruba language as well. As we sat down over coffee yesterday with our Chinese and Indian friends, I realised how related my local Nigerian language was to theirs. One thing stood out for us - none of our local languages had any gender differentiation. 'He' or 'She' didn't exist in our languages, rather we had words to differentiate between an older person and a younger person as a sign of respect - a trait completely absent in the English language. The French language is even more complicated and interesting on the gender qualification as even things needed to be qualified as female or male. We realised that languages had their different idiosyncrasie...
I recently read a post online where the best graduating student from Bells University of Technology, Ota, Nigeria (CGPA 4.89 out of 5.0) had been interviewed. The content of her interview or her responses to the questions asked is not what I intend to discuss on this post. Rather, it is the responses of people to her success that I would like to address. There were many comments about how easy it must have been for her to graduate with a first class because she attended a private university. Others were sure that if she had attended a public school, she would probably have graduated with a second class lower degree at the most. They undermined her success forgetting that in the same graduating set, 86 students had graduated with a third class degree, 119 had second class lower and 123 had second class upper degrees. Of the 28 who made the first class, this girl had come out tops. The comments not only baffled me but also started to infuriate me as I had...
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