Adesua Yɛ Ya
Studying is not jollof rice — especially when you don’t like what you’re studying.
Have you ever heard the saying, “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life”? I figured out the academic version:
Learn what you love, and you’ll never cram a day in your life.
Unfortunately, I figured this out late in life. Chemistry was hell!!! Oh how I hated that course. 😩
I’d like you to meet my first-year chemistry teacher. We called him “Coma”, because he always put us to sleep — true story. Maybe “Chloroform” would have been a more appropriate name for him, but we didn’t know enough chemistry to get the joke.
Our seniors said Coma was a nice man, but I never saw him smile. Ever. For an entire year, I cannot remember seeing him express joy or happiness of any sort. As far as I was concerned, he was the friggin’ Grinch.
Obviously, Coma’s grinchy disposition was not helping my lack of love for chemistry.
I was not pumped up about the periodic table, or Avogadro’s constant, and I certainly didn’t gie a hoot about the difference between molarity and molality. So imagine my mood when i found out that chemistry was the first exam I had on Monday.
I was in a mess.
Prep
Prep time during revision week is very different from regular prep time; there is always this thick, almost tangible air of urgency.
The problem with this new atmosphere it that it seems to inhibit brain functionality. When that pressure sets in, your brain begins to act like a car refusing to start.
The Friday before the paper, I got to prep, opened my text book, and saw all these scary equations jump out at me like some hideous jack-in-a-box.
My thoughts were all mangled; my eyes read the same lines again and again; my eye-lids grew heavy; I woke up- wait, what?! I fell asleep? This was going to be harder than I thought.
A quick glance at my watch told me that it was eight o’clock: one hour to go.
I stood up and moved to the back of the class with my text book… if I couldn’t sit and study I would stand and study.
That day, I learnt that you can stand and sleep. The chemistry was refusing to enter my head.
After I almost fell down sleep-standing, I went back to my desk and began to negotiate with my brain. “Chale, we for learn this thing oo, Atico is real”.
I swear, my brain sang back, “🎵Today I don’t feel like doing aaaaaanything…🎵”
I have not listened to Bruno Mars ever since.
For the next thirty minutes, this was me:
At the end of prep, the score was Kodzo 0 : 1 Brain. You would think a man’s brain would be on his side.
I did my best for the rest of the week. Out of the four chapters I had to cover I managed to study a whole one and half. At least, I knew that there were 6.02214086 × 1023 atoms in every mole of a substance. I learnt the value in standard form to eight decimal places for good measure. Talk about vanity metrics.
Needless to say, Monday morning rushed at me faster than I could say “Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane“. If ever I hated the sound of the early morning rising bell, it was that Monday morning.
Monday Morning
“Bro!”
I looked up. It was Obodai.
“Hey”, I replied, in a rather dreary voice. “Why all the excitement this morning?”
“Chemistry. Adey come kill the paper!”
I was shocked. “You dey barb the chem? You can balance acid-base reaction equations?!”
Here I was thinking we were all in the same boat. Did Obodai knew something I didn’t?
“Oh simple kraa, I thought you got this in class.”
Yup. He knew something I didn’t.
“DUDE!!! I WAS ASLEEP!!!”, I bellowed. “And the textbook wasn’t helping”, I continued, almost ready to cry.
“Prof Quarm?”, he asked.
“Yeah”, I replied.
“Umm, you should throw that book away.” He pulled out an Elective Chemistry textbook from his bag.
Over the next 20 minutes Obodai transformed me into a full-fledged acid-base equation balancer. I could balance acid-base equations for Ghana — I was on a roll.
He flipped to the next page and my heart sunk.
“What do they mean ‘balance the equation between HCL and aluminium’? Aluminium is a metal, not a base.”
“Yeah”, Obodai began to explain, “this is a little diff-”
“Ooooobooooodaaaaaaiiiiiii!!!!”. It was Eben, the house prefect
“Oh shoot! I forgot to iron Eben’s shirt!” And just like that he took off.
I was left trying to make sense of HCl + Al like my life depended on it.
Without any shame, I declined to shower that morning. I spent the time trying to understand the equation, really, I tried. It wasn’t working. Throughout breakfast that morning my head was buried in the pages of the book. I didn’t even touch my bread.
After what seemed like forever, and just five minutes before I entered the classroom, I did the unthinkable, I memorized all thirteen remaining equations in the chapter. This is cramming on a level known to Ghanaians as ‘Babadie‘.
I can’t say I was confident when I finally sat down to take the paper. All I could do was pray. My fate was in the hands of Coma, and I felt I needed to move it into Divine hands.
“It’s eight o’clock, turn your sheets over and start work”, the invigilator announced.
Friends, God answers prayer. I turned the sheet over, and smiling up at me was the first question: Write a balanced equation for a reaction between Aluminium and Hydrochloric Acid.
True happiness is when you practice babadie and six out of the thirteen equations you chewed show up in the exam. I poured the answers on the paper before they could leak out of my eyes, ears and nostrils — my brain had already proven that it did not want to be trusted.
At the end of the day, the score was Kodzo 6 : 1 Brain, and Babadie was the man of the match.
Oh, I made that paper cry.
Eventually, Coma was changed as our chemistry teacher, and Mr. Kpodzro took over for Science 4 from our second year till our final year.
Mr. K was a straight up awesome teacher. I never would love chemistry, but at least I could love my teacher enough to fool myself into studying it.
Learn what you love (or at least, learn from those you love), and you’ll never cram a day in your life.