Africa-Press – Botswana. Letsopa Junior Secondary School (JSS) students have been encouraged to have good self-esteem, avoid peer pressure, and set standards that will shape their future.
They were also urged to feel confident and be positive about themselves so that other people could respect them.
Miss Botswana 2021, and the 2021 Miss World finalist, was speaking during the Letsopa Junior Secondary School (JSS) Valentine’s Day celebration in Lobatse last Wednesday.
Ms Palesa Molefe said the word ‘love’ for young people, meant that they should love themselves enough to be able to set goals and standards that would help them to succeed in their studies and life.
“How you treat yourselves, what you speak about yourselves and what you believe about yourselves are what other people will speak and believe about you in return,” she said. “I need you to put into consideration all the relationships that you have in your lives.”
Ms Molefe said students should have self-esteem and confidence because the latter was key to a successful future.
She warned them against falling victims to peer pressure and doing bad things in an attempt to please their friends and should not allow their friends and colleagues to dictate what they should do at school.
She said though it was human nature to want acceptance, they should not look for it by pleasing others because that won’t benefit them in their studies.
“If you allow yourself to always want to go with the wave, always want to go with what is cool, always want to go where people will clap for you, you will minimise the trajectory of your own life. If you want to giggle and gaggle at the back of the class, if you do not want to pick something up in your life that can make the future for you, you will minimise your trajectory. Pick up something and work out being the best on that,” she said.
Letsopa JSS Senior Teacher for Guidance and Counselling, Ms Lekwalo Thobega, pointed out that the school held the Valentine’s Day celebration to show students that the school loved and cared for them.
She said they wanted to help students understand what love was. In most cases, she said, young people misunderstood love to mean sexual relationships.
Ms Thobega said: “We want our students to stay away from sexual relationships and understand that there are different types of love and relationships. They should be able to differentiate between the healthy and unhealthy friendly and social relationships. We want them to be in a position to identify signs of toxic relationships in their lives.”
The School Head, Mr Godiraone Gothaang, said the problem of absent parenting caused the school to decline in performance in the Junior Certificate Examinations last year.
He said the school dropped from 46.8 percent pass rate in 2022 to 44.6 percent last year.
Mr Gothaang said: “We expected a lot from our results but they went down, simply because of lack of parenting. We have absent parenting in Letsopa. So we need stakeholders to assist us to bring parents forth because it is difficult for teachers alone to make it. Absent parenting is a serious problem, teachers at Letsopa JSS are trying hard. We just plead with the community to assist us mold the children.”
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