
Cigarette smoke hangs in the air of the unkempt room as Nedu popped one stick after another like a pig who is in a raced to munch his meal.
The cigarette gives him a sense of pleasure, due to the failure to perform well in his previous marked test and the many carryover in his previous exams, the cigarette paved way for great pleasure and sparkles excitement and enjoyment, which encourages him to never stop.
But truly Nedu, Wants to stop, he has made efforts to run away from what he started 12 years ago, but the more he tries, the more he smokes.
Although smoking is dated way back to as early as 500 B.C in the Americans in Shamanistic rituals with the arrivals of the Europeans in the 16th century, the consumption, cultivation and trading of tobacco quickly spread with the modernization of farm equipment and manufacturing bore the cigarette following reconstruction in the United States.
This method of consumption quickly expanded the scope of consumption which grew until the scientific controversies of the 1960s and condemnation in the 1980s.
Smoking is inhalation of tobacco or use of substances which could be dangerous to human health.
Medical personnel have stressed that smoking is very dangerous as it causes, cancer, emphysema and heart diseases that can shorten one’s life by ten years or more and that the habit can cost a smoker thousands of Naira a year. So how comes people are still lighting up? The answer in a word is addiction.
Smoking is a hard habit to break because tobacco contains nicotine which is highly addictive, like heroin or other addictive drugs, the body and mind quickly becomes so used to the nicotine in cigarette that the person needs to have it just to feel normal (Emotions come with the addiction).
People start smoking for a variety of different reasons, some think it looks cool. Other start to smoke because their family members or friends smoke, most adults who started smoking in their teens never expected to become addicted that is why people say it is just so much easier to not start smoking at all.
There are no physical reasons to start smoking, the body does not need tobacco the way it needs food, water, sleep, air and exercise. Many of the chemicals in cigarette like nicotine and cyanide are actually poisons that can kill in high enough closes, consequences of this poison happen gradually.
Nedu is among the 10.2 Million Nigerians suffering from tobacco addiction and who are facing serious health risks like heart disease, stroke, emphysema (breakdown of lung tissue) and many types of cancer, including lung, throat, stomach and bladder cancer. People who smoke also have an increased risk of infections like bronchitis and pneumonia.
These disease limit a person ability to be normally active and they can be fatal, smokers not only develop wrinkles and yellow teeth, they also lose bone density, which increase their risk of osteoporosis, a condition that causes older people to become bent over and bones to break more easily, both men and women.
Smoking also result to bad skin, because it slow the flow of blood vessel, it can prevent oxygen and nutrients from getting to the skin which is why smokers often appears pale and unhealthy.
Smokers are likely to have bad breath, because cigarette leave smokers with a condition called halitosis or persistence bad breath, bad smelling cloth and hair, reduce athletic performance, greater risk of injury and slower healing time, which increased risk of illness and many more.
Staying smoke free will give you a whole lot more of everything, more energy, better performance, better looks, more money in your pocket and in the long run more life to live.
Meanwhile, others curses are varied based upon each country and region. According to results gathered at my institutions, poor academic performance might be yielded because of poor teaching, due to a gap between materials used to teach and evaluation instruments especially those used for international purposes. These gaps have to be bridged.
I believe that local materials need to meet international standards. I also believe that teachers, professors, and administrators must meet international standards as well.
One needs to be aware that there are textbooks from publishing companies that state their materials follow international guidelines. Watch out because these materials are made by wolves dressed in sheep skin.
One comment though, material designers as well as evaluators must bear in mind the ways of doing things in local cultures as well as the impact of the language they use in assessment instruments.
Last but not least, each culture interprets language differently. Each culture has a different conception of time and place.
Thus teachers and professors in their localities must train their students to be more competitive based upon local conceptions and real and attainable international standards.
Both local and global education goes hand in hand and they affect positively or negatively our future, our salaries, and development.