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Letters | Coronavirus pandemic hardships can be overcome, Hong Kong’s DSE students should take heart
- As this cohort of school leavers sit for their exams, they should look back on the past two years of challenges with gratitude for the lessons learned
- There are many inspiring examples of how obstacles became fuel for personal growth
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For the next month, thousands of local school leavers will have to face the “first hurdle” in their working life – the Diploma of Secondary Education (DSE) exams. This cohort of young people have had to face two consecutive years of unprecedented challenges: the protest movement of 2019, followed by the pandemic-induced disruptions to school life since last year.
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Some may say they are unlucky as they have had to adapt to the “new normal” in learning. In the past, students attended school and learned from teachers face to face. But after the outbreak of Covid-19, the fluctuation of case numbers determined whether students attended school.
They have had to switch to a new mode of learning – online learning. I believe this is the perfect time for our young people to develop discipline and time management skills.
In 2003, Hong Kong was hit by a different epidemic, the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak. At that time, a young talent, Horatio Boedihardjo, was discovered and nurtured by his father. The boy went on to gain admission to Oxford University’s doctorate programme aged 17, after obtaining first-class honours in a Bachelor’s degree in mathematics at the university. His brother March was admitted to the maths department of Baptist University at the age of nine. This is just one of the stories from that time of adversity.
What about the university students in China during the Japanese invasion of 1937? The students from the country’s leading universities in Beijing – Peking and Tsinghua – had to move from one place to another – first to Changsha, then finally to Kunming. Their merged university became the renowned South Western Associated University in Kunming, which was the cradle of the first Chinese Nobel laureate Professor Yang Chen-ning, who was nurtured in makeshift laboratories. Hence, hardship proved to be no obstacle for this young scholar.
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