School director ties academic success to discipline, focus

Parents must strive to ensure that their wards lead disciplined and focused lifestyles, as well as cherish hard work as a groundswell could be lost to indiscipline and loss of focus.

Making this assertion in an interview with The Guardian in the wake of her school’s 2015 Christmas concert, Director, Dawn Michaels School (DMS), Lagos, Mrs. Uche Ndulue, said in a world suffused by different shades of distractions, hard work, discipline, focus and moral education would help students to stay the course and ultimately excel in their academic pursuits.

“It is very important for moral education to be taught alongside academics because you need a disciplined and focused mind to be successful. In other words, you need to be disciplined to be successful in life because in contemporary living, pupils are faced with different forms of distractions in the society. So, if students are not particularly monitored, there is a tendency that they would slide into situations that would definitely cause them to loose focus in their studies,” she stated.

Ndulue continued, “Here at Dawn Michaels School, because we pride ourselves as a Christian school, we start very early to impress on our pupils the need for them to be disciplined and stay focused in their academic pursuits so that when they get to higher schools both within and outside the country, they would continue to uphold these values imbued in them.

The educationist, who also stressed the importance of parents showing more than a passing interest in their children’s education, said her school harps on the need for parents to develop interest in how their kids are nurtured educationally.

“We always need their (parents’) compliance and assistance in helping us to drive home what we teach, and what we stand for. It is important for parents to get involved with how we are raising their kids through the feedbacks that we get from them. Since parents are, by and large, part of the school community, their support is always needed if our common goal of raising disciplined and educated children must be achieved,” she stated.

Ndulue continued, “Here, we bring in our parents when there is need and educate them on some of our teaching methods so that they could help in furthering this at home. For instance, since our pre-school pupils are also involved in the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), which we have created here, and cannot open the website to do the assignments on their own, parents are the ones to assist them in doing the assignments online and submitting same. But it is different with the older students, who are expected to go ahead and do the assignments themselves.

Insisting that, “parents’ involvement in the education of our children is a critical component of Dawn Michaels School,” she added, “They have to be carried along to enable them see reasons why some of the positions we take must be respected. I give you an example. In the area of dress code, we don’t allow students to come to school with beads on their hair. They are also not allowed to come to school with metal cutleries. On Tuesday’s and Thursday’s, pupils are allowed to come to school with only food and water and not with fizzy drinks. Once parents understand and see reasons why we do these and partner us in doing these things, then we are on the right track.”