Apart from well-known teachers like APJ Abdul Kalam and Super 30 Founder, Anand Kumar, there are many other unsung heroes who are doing something special in a bid to make teaching more effective. Most of them may not be “teachers” technically, but their work is leaving a lasting impact on the students they’ve been with. This Teachers’ Day, we salute 5 such inspiring personalities:
Her unfulfilled desire to become a teacher inspired Roshni Mukherjee to start a YouTube channel in 2011, “ExamFearVideos” that has shared more than 3,700Â educational video lessons on Physics, Mathematics, Biology & Chemistry with concepts & tricks never explained so well before. She’s also launched a website now, examfear.com, that uploads these free videos. Her YouTube channel has 82,000+ subscribers right now and the number of students who’ve been benefitting from her videos keeps increasing by the day.
Who would quit the luxuries of a dream job in London to go teach the deprived children of a village called Waifad in Wardha district of Maharashtra? There are dreamers like Shuvajit Payne, an economics graduate from the Presidency College, Kolkata and an MBA from IIM, Lucknow who would dare to do so! He reached this small village as part of SBI’s Youth for India fellowship program. He spent his time at Waifad teaching English, computer skills, building confidence and offering career counseling. Shuvajit’s guidance has seen a village student going on to become a software developer.
When she reached the remote Kanki village in Odisha, Shalini Krishnan was overwhelmed by the artistic & creative abilities of the tribal children in a school there being run by an NGO, Gram Vikas. Realising their potential and the fact that there was no platform to display their talent, Shalini started a design & creativity studio, ” Kalpanadham” for them. Currently she is training roughly 20 students and 2 teachers on various aspects of design and plans to convince state officials to include art & design in the school curriculum.
Mukesh Kumar Lathiya is a government school teacher in a small village in Gujarat, Dhamil, who is always on the look-out to make his classroom child-friendly and interesting. The newspaper doesn’t reach the village before afternoon, so he makes printouts of the e-newspaper and puts them up on the notice-board of the school. To ensure a holistic learning experience, he set up “library corners” in each classroom to make books easily accessible to the students.
He had to mortgage his house for the funds required to start a college in Sandalpur village in Madhya Pradesh offering courses like BBA, B.com, BCA, Micro Biology. Meet Sandalpur in Madhya Pradesh who quit being a programme manager in Bengaluru to start the Sant Singaji Institute of Science and Management (SSISM) in an attempt to provide quality education and soft skills to rural youth so that they were at par with the more privileged students in the cities and towns of India. Students from SSISM have gone on to get jobs in reputed firms Wipro, SAP, Future Group etc.