Before I start talking about Teach for India, let me give
you some background on me. I am a B.com from Ness wadia College, a Chartered Financial
Analyst from ICFAI and recently I have completed my LLB from Pune University. I
am very aptly qualified for my previous job at PwC as an Indirect Tax Consultant.
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| My Desk at PwC |
This
is my desk at PwC. As you can see I was so good at my job that I was always
surrounded by files pertaining to the clients I was working on. PwC did teach
me a lot. It taught me respect and teamwork and quality over quantity. But still
what I was doing there was not enough for me as a person.
I have an inherent belief that the only way the world can
become better is if people actually go out and change it. So the question that
always haunted me in my cushy consultancy job was Am I changing the world, Am I
making it a better place? Was filing the service tax returns of a company
making a difference to the world? I think not.
So I started wondering what to do about it. I realized very
early on that the root cause of anything that goes wrong in this world, be it littering,
ill treatment of animals, spitting on the ground,etc - all stem from one main
cause – lack of education. At this time Teach for India walked into my life. I
applied for TFI on a whim. I mean I honestly didn’t believe that I would
actually give up an awesome job at such a reputed company , earning quite a
decent salary, with growth opportunities and all such perks, to do what? Teach
kids? But today I am glad that my inner voice guided me to this place and I am
glad that I listened to that inner voice. Now I have the opportunity to actually
tap into that root cause and change the world from there.
These past five weeks training with TFI have been truly
transformational.
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| Abhijit, Me,Meenakshi and Prakriti at the Happy Tree |
I love my work place and my peers,
my friends. We were 4 teachers to a class room. That is us, with me hugging the
Happy Tree which has flowers with all out student’s names. Our classroom was
called the Happy Learners. You can see the joy in our smiles. We would go to
summer school by 7 am and everyday we felt that we didn’t get there early
enough. 9 o clock, the usual corporate timings was half way through the day for
us. We might have worked for 20 hours and slept for only 4 hours everyday
during these past five weeks, but every morning when our students walked into
class we were wide awake ready to teach them something new.
These bright faces have been my clients for the past five weeks.
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| Class 2B Class Assembly |
The kid showing of the V in the front row is Pranav – Pranav wants to be a CID man. The only
student who doesn’t want to be an Engineer, Doctor or Teacher. His father is a
Policeman, that is where he gets his
inspiration from. Pranav is the 3 feet nothing of a boy who always wants to
answer, who can never keep quiet, who will yell out the answers without being
asked to. But, when he was made the class monitor, his CID side came out. He
was so efficient at making sure that every student sat in his or her place,
without pushing or pulling the child. And that is a big thing. By the end of
summer school he was the one who had the responsibility to make sure everyone
in the class was quiet and he performed it so very brilliantly while his own
performance also improved dramatically.
The boy with folded arms in the front row next to the girl in the red dress is Yash Avale. Don’t let the picture fool you; Yash is
one of the most kinesthetic learners I have come across. He cannot sit still,
he cannot sustain his attention when the teacher is explaining something, he
cannot keep quiet. He always needs to move his hands. He would poke people,
play drums with his pencils, hum in the middle of class. And let me tell you,
he would still know everything, but would never apply it. I was lucky enough to
discover his fondness for clay when I gave him a small piece of blue tack. And
I say lucky because most of the time you discover the problem too late to find
a solution. The one day he had blue tack with him, he kept quiet through the
class and actually listened. At the end of summer school I gave him a piece of
clay and told him that whenever he needs to move his hands, use the clay and it
will work. I know it will work because I am just the same.
There is one more story about Yash. We had to do a community
visit during our five weeks of training. My co teachers who visited Yash’s
house told me later on that at home Yash was shy and quiet and did not say move
around or even say a word. This was a complete contrast to the ever moving,
ever talking effervescent Yash in my classroom. At home he was repressed and in
school he was free.
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| Together we can make a difference |
I wish I could tell you the story of every student in my
class. But that would mean us sitting here till midnight, because there is just
so much to tell. When I see these faces, I wonder why is it that they don’t
have the same opportunities as the kids their age in private schools do.They
are just as brilliant and just as capable or learning. It is nothing but the Achievement
Gap. By sheer luck of draw, these kids were born into low income families who
cannot afford private schools. They have to go to Government run Schools. And our country is such that Government
schools are associated with poor education quality where these happy faces fall
victim to this unfairness.
They don’t even know it yet.
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| Doing what I believe in - One A for Apple at a time |
Our students are some of the brightest and most eager
minds that I have met. If I can spend the next two years, proving to them that
they have the potential to do anything they want, to be any thing they want,
teaching them how to imbibe knowledge and skill with or without me being there
to help them and showing them the things that they can do, I know I would be
making a difference in this world.
