MATHEMATICS is always one of the hardest subjects in school; any child can attest to that. At the Grade Six level, many students just can’t keep up with the arithmetic, computations, word problems, fractions and so much more. For little Shakina London of the Watooka Day Primary School in Linden, however, Mathematics was no problem for the little number genius.

She managed to cop a perfect score for mathematics and only lost 10 marks in the entire examination. She is the top student for her school, the second top student for Region 10 and gained a place at Queen’s college with 519 marks. Shakina is more than a mathematician, in fact minus her struggles she may have scored more marks and could have even topped the country.

She was not a normal student who benefitted from six years of a curriculum preparing you for the NGSA, she also did not benefit from the accumulated marks from the National Grades Two and Four Assessment. Shakina only migrated to Guyana during the last term of Grade Five. In fact, she was not even attending school before then, since her parents opted to home school her.

For the little shy 11-year-old, with less than a year to prepare for the NGSA, she had to beat the odds of transitioning; had to adapt to a whole new school and social setting of learning; learn concepts of a local curriculum; make friends; deal with a plethora of challenges; deal with being homesick amongst other issues.

The little timid 11-year-old said that she is still astonished about her overwhelmingly excellent performance as she reminisced on all the challenges she faced transitioning. “It was a little hard dealing with the curriculum, the hardest subject was Social Studies but what I did was at school study during any free time I have and when I was at home I would have read a lot,” she said.

While her preference lies in being home schooled overseas, what she appreciates at school and her teachers here is that they push you to meet your pinnacle performance. It was the pushing of her teacher, Rhonda Rose, that she said played an integral role in her success.
Some of the challenges she faced were making friends and fitting in with the rest of the children. “I was scared that they won’t like me because I was different from them and then they were a few people that were a little mean but it didn’t bother me much,” she said. Speaking of the extra lessons she said that was another transitioning challenge since she spent most of her after-school time at lessons.

Her mother Sinetta London said that with Shakina not being in a regular school setting prior, she was a little scared of how difficult it would have been for her to adapt. She is still surprised by her performance. “I was concerned in putting her in a regular school especially because of the Social Studies because she was not doing the local Social Studies and that was my biggest concern. It became a challenge actually. In fact, that was her lowest scoring subject, in Math, she got a perfect score, so I didn’t foresee her being at the top in terms of actually coming so late and making it, I didn’t foresee it at all,” London said. Her teacher, Rhonda Rose said that she was not too surprised about Shakina’s performance because she was a very smart girl.