In my final year of high school, I tutored a Grade 9 locally developed math class. In this class, the academic level ranged from students who could perform basic algebraic operations to students who couldn’t sum the value of two coins. Joining the class, I knew that there was no content in it that I couldn’t do in my sleep. I had taken classes in the “enriched” stream since the beginning of high school and was confident that I would be able to efficiently teach the students what I thought were basic math concepts. At the time, I was taking AP Literature, AP Calculus, and AP Physics; and between all of these classes, I can confidently say that I learned the most tutoring Foundational Mathematics. It gave me perspective. We’ve all learned that segregation between white people and people of colour was abolished almost a century ago. Reading Tom Sawyer—another Mark Twain novel about slavery—showed me the horrors of segregation and its effect on society. We all know that segregation is horrible. We know this, and yet, we justify segregation based on the perceived “intelligence” of students, measured by arbitrary scribbles on a stale, flattened tree. Some might argue that students who are less arithmetically adept may struggle under the course load of a destreamed curriculum—and I agree, to an extent. But the real harm to these students isn’t their “mental strength”; it’s the system that labels them by arbitrary quantitative data like “IQ” or grades. This raises a bigger issue in the school system: why do we tier students? And of course, the school board will jump to their achievements, like renaming their “r-word” program to the “enriched-but-to-an-extent-haha” program. Are we serious? Changing the names of these programs does nothing but dress the blatant segregation in a leopard-print tutu. Now, I do agree that students need some form of tiering, but it can’t be as debilitating and restrictive as it is currently. Students in this class aren’t given a chance—they’re labelled superfluously to veil what the school board really wants to call them. Through tutoring this class, one student stood out particularly. Let’s call him Kobe (he always wore a Lakers hat). Through the lens of the school board, he was the perfected formula for a locally developed student. He was quiet, reserved, and gave little effort in school. When we handed him work for our daily “math minute,” he would silently put the sheet to the side and doodle on the margins of the page. These doodles were magnificent. The margins of his duotang were filled with elaborate code resembling complex math, numbers, and algebra. It looked like Rosetta’s Stone in 2B graphite. It resembled Newton’s Mathematica Principia—no, more like if Newton wrote down every thought that passed through his head. It was a jumbled mess. A mess that only someone like Alan Turing and 20 TB of RAM could dream of deciphering. Truly, a cryptographer’s dream. At first, I questioned it. Maybe it was a hyperfixation—some sort of recurring memory or obsession with numbers and arithmetic. And to this day, I still think it was; he was truly addicted to numbers. At the front of the classroom, we stored a bin of assorted cheap calculators. One day, Kobe asked if he could borrow a calculator from me. I agreed and handed him one from the bin. He shook his head and pointed toward the Casio fx-911 in my hand. I was puzzled, but I pulled out my secondary calculator from my bag (another fx-911, I think) and gave it to him. As I walked around the classroom helping other students, his duotang caught my eye again. This time, it wasn’t as messy. There was a strict, ruler-drawn box containing several diagrams of the assorted bin calculators. This stunned me. Elaborate. Elaborate. Elaborate. Truly, it wasn’t just this student who was unbelievably gifted in other ways than arithmetic. One girl in the class had a beautiful sketchbook filled with illustrations of self-created characters. Every day during math minute, she drew new characters in this notebook. Another student was incredibly genuine and was a breath of fresh air to help. Every single one of these students was talented in one way or another. I wanted them to embrace their love for their particular activity—to live and breathe their hobby. But what was I going to do? Change the whole system without a solution in mind? Yeah, right. You could feel a level of anger in the room. Actually—no—not anger per se, but a slight tinge of dissatisfaction. And I’m not just saying this to make some point that “these students want free!!!” I could genuinely feel a level of discomfort in the room. The last thing I want to do in this article is generalize (in fact, the entire topic of this article is to not generalize), but I don’t think these students had much parental support. I come from a loving family who raised me well—no smoking, no alcohol, no staying up too late, and “Don’t forget to bring a coat/umbrella/boots” type of parents. Some students smelled like weed and cigarettes when they came to class. Some came in dirty clothes and oily hair. Some came with bruises. I have no information other than what I saw, and I can only speculate what was happening at home. I am fortunate to be where I am because of my family. This class happened in the second period. In the first period, I had AP Physics. There were obvious and less obvious parallels. AP Physics students are just as brilliant as locally developed students. “Brilliant,” in Masa’s dictionary, is “the potential to create change or the kinetic creation of change.” The AP Physics students’ brilliance had all the potential to create something that could theoretically change humanity. They knew all the theory and abstract ideas to spur this potential. The locally developed students’ brilliance is harder to define. These students are incredibly diverse in their skills. But of course, the majority rules. If we take the ratio of AP Physics students’ brilliance to a locally developed student’s brilliance, we end up with a ratio between an entire AP Physics class and one student. Thus, we often find students in locally developed classes underrepresented. I’m now studying Engineering Science at the University of Toronto. My cohort is filled with absolute and pure academic, AP Physics–esque, IMO-winner–esque brilliance. I am truly running with the best to be my best. One thing that many of my peers question is whether or not this program is truly for us. Imposter syndrome is a pandemic in Engineering Science. Yet, we push on. I feel genuinely stupid compared to a lot of students here—yet we push on. The thing is, students in the locally developed class are not performing their best simply because they are not running with the best in their niche. At EngSci, the niche is science and mathematics. For the artistic girl, the niche is visual art. For Kobe, I don’t fully know what his niche is, but if there is something there, I’d just need some time. Students in locally developed need people like them. Simple as that.