Academic prowess proven

King's High School pupil Shaun Markham (16) worked hard to achieve NCEA level 2 with excellence....
King's High School pupil Shaun Markham (16) worked hard to achieve NCEA level 2 with excellence. Photo by Craig Baxter.
Not many teenagers would want to spend all their spare time studying, but Shaun Markham had a worthy point to prove.

The King's High School pupil has cerebral palsy and is used to people staring at him in the street or thinking he is ignorant.

To prove them wrong, Shaun worked hard academically and set his sights on achieving NCEA with excellence "to show other people what I'm capable of and what people with disabilities can achieve".

He had been striving for the achievement for the past two years and after putting in 40-hour weeks of study, including school, he was proud to get his results this week and see he received NCEA level 2 with excellence.

"It's a pretty big achievement. It just shows anything is possible," he said.

What made it even more special was that Shaun was only able to study five subjects, due to suffering fatigue, so had fewer opportunities to gain points, and was assisted by a scribe for his exams because he cannot write.

His father Richard said he and wife Carroll knew Shaun would not be able to compete with his peers on a sporting level, so academia was a way for him to gain respect and challenge others.

"He is still going to be discriminated against in the workforce, so the higher marks he can get the better," Mr Markham said.

Shaun now aims to achieve excellence at NCEA level 3 and study commerce at the University of Otago.

He likes working with numbers and wants to get into accounting and commercial law.

- ellie.constantine@odt.co.nz

 

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