Even The Best Of Teachers Get Frustrated By Untrainable Students!

Environmental impact assessment....
Feasibility studies.....
Soil tests......
....Some of the pertinent preconditions laid down by regulatory authorities to ensure that construction standards are met and lives are not put at needless risks... And we may adapt such principles of safety to our daily lives even at elementary levels by recalling some geography....or chemistry.....or physics.... May we not?

The beauty of science!
Have you ever felt compelled to offer unsolicited advice to persons who are not academically equipped to grasp the real essence or import of your counsel?

What if such advice is predicated on sound scientific basis?

Or your "student" is someone who harbours some weird superiority complex....borne of financial muscle, age or other mundane denominators?

What if your scientific background leads you to foresee an environmental disaster...at least from a local perspective...if your determined admonition is not heeded?

Would you still adopt a wait-and-see attitude....even if you envision a flooding catastrophe ?

As the objects of your free counsel expect you to know nothing relating to the issue at hand....as they pointedly ask you if you read brick-laying along with medicine! "Se e ko iyen mo ise doctor ni"?....they asked persistently as I painstakingly explained the risk of needless flooding to them in the most basic language!

What if this relation demonstrates this unwholesome attitude across board? For instance, she would turn a deaf ear to medical counsel only to ask her kids to arrange cash donations for medical fees when such preventable problems spiral out if hand! Yet she is as lucid as ever and her stubbornness is legion...starting way back from her younger days!

I had cause to pay an unscheduled visit to an elderly parent over the weekend only to observe that construction of a gutter in front of the house....and the one next to it....was at an advanced stage....

Space re-dugged out....
Sand already purchased and "on site".....
Bricks neatly arranged and ready...
Ditto bags of cement....
Further observations:
Unwavering delimiters to canal length....
....canal blocked in front by the jutting fence of the next building...

....canal "blocked" in the rear by its short length of lying in front of just two buildings....thus assuming the shape of a long shallow narrow lake....

....shallow in depth....yet planned to have a cemented base....blocking free percolation of water into mother earth...

....cemented bricks on sides of canal....further compounding the problem of percolation....

....total width of precemented canal barely that of three 9-inch bricks laid side-to-side... thus envisioned to have a breath no more than the width of a cement brick after construction....

Now the natural slope of the ground is towards the direction of this gospel-singer-fence-building neighbour.

This "Ajanaku-crooner" left me sorely disappointed by her inclination to behave in such irresponsible manner in spite of her apparent education...."even ignoring the admonition of the CDA to lend her person to more civil comportment"!

So, approaching her to effect necessary adjustments to her drainage- blocking fence is out of the question....

.....especially when the mother I am trying to protect is wont to yell at me to mind my own business!

Where is this impervious short narrow shallow canal draining into?

POST SCRIPT
Just you might view my perplexity by my mother in clearer perspective..... I would illustrate it in the following format:

Problem....Anytime she felt ill during her active days as a POP Technician at National Orthopedic Hospital, Lagos.

Her panacea....She would simply navigate to Morocco Road just behind the huge hospital and allow the chemist boys dispense to her a funny combination of tablets and capsules!....notwithstanding the fact that she had just been in the OR applying POP to operated body parts!

Problem....My niece injures a bone or joint...
Her panacea....She simply manoeuvres patient and parents to NOHI and without consulting any doctor therein....however highly placed....teams up with her POP colleagues to apply POP on the injured part.

Problem....She is coughing.
Her panacea....She simply collects an impressive heap of herbs, cooks it, and starts drinking it under my nose!

Problem....She seem to urinate often, she is painfully thin despite consuming huge meals...and passing bulky stools. You suspect endocrine and endocrine assault on her pancreas and after explaining, implore her to agree to further investigation.....diabetes mellitus and malabsorption at the back of your mind.

Her Reply..."S'o ti de'le"? ("Have you landed"?)....and as you nod your head to signify a "yes", she continues....

"Awon arun t'o maa pa e l'o da'ruko yen! (You have just recited the diseases that would kill you!)

Dr Tosin Akindele is a medical practitioner and public affairs analyst.