While waiting at New Delhi railway station about a year ago, Nakul Arora saw a young boy, aged about nine, stealing a carton of packaged water bottles from a Shatabdi express that had just pulled in. The boy ran and hid in a corner, gathered his friends and directed them to take a few bottles each and sell them outside the station.

Arora, 22, was both astounded by the mature tone in the child's voice and horrified that he was stealing.

He overheard onlookers saying that such children are a danger to the nation. “They should be arrested and sent to shelter homes,” said one.

This incident got Arora thinking about how society had failed this child and how underprivileged children should have access to education. He applied to Teach For India, a non-profit organisation which gives fellowships to college graduates and young professionals who commit two years to teach full-time in under-resourced schools. Arora now teaches Class III at the National Public School in Jhilmil, Delhi.

In its fourth year of operations, Teach For India currently has 370 fellows teaching in Mumbai, Pune and Delhi. It is looking for an additional 450 fellows, says its CEO, Shaheen Mistry. Schools in Chennai and Hyderabad will join the Teach For India family next academic year. Last year, 250 fellows were selected out of 5,000 applicants — “we are looking for people who can put their children on a different life path in those two years,” she says.

No superstars please!

The rigorous selection process involves an online application, an exam, a phone interview and an all-day assessment. “We don't want people who think ‘I have been a superstar at a foreign bank and I can come in and do a great job and turn these schools around and all the teachers are rubbish' — we are really nervous about that mindset,” says Shaheen.

Yet, no amount of training can prepare them for the real thing. “They realise how unbelievably hard it is to be a teacher and function efficiently in this kind of environment. The experience itself breaks them down more than anything else,” she says.

“There are 27 unique kids in my class,” says Arora. Hearing one of them use curse words, he thought the child may have picked it up from his elder brother. “But just today, I found out that his father, a drunkard, beats him up every night and uses those words. How do I deal with something like that?” Shaheen describes the difficulty involved in teaching older children who have not had a decent grounding in the earlier classes. And, as all of them are at different levels on the learning curve, the challenge is to bridge the gap between them and kids from a privileged background.

Challenges beyond the classroom

Fellows undergo an intensive five-week residential training programme before arriving at their respective schools. But nothing can really prepare them for what can come up in a classroom.

Shaheen narrates the experience of Vipul Shaha, a fellow in Pune, who was about to lose one of his bright students because the family was returning to their village in Rajasthan. “He knew that unless he got her a scholarship to go to a boarding school, the kid would never get an education again — so he raised the money, found a really good school and convinced the school to give the child a scholarship for the rest of her schooling. He also helped the family find employment.”

Under-nourishment is a major worry at these schools, and the teachers are often called upon to tackle this issue too. While the fellows are not equipped to deal with complex issues beyond the classroom, such as family matters, they make community and home visits with their students. Srini Swaminathan, a 32-year-old BITS Pilani graduate, says, “We spend time outside the class with the children to try and understand the baggage they come with to school. We then go and talk to the parents.”

How it works

In the first year, fellows focus solely on teaching, while in the second they take up ‘Be the Change' projects — impact of which goes beyond the classroom to the wider school or community. The project could be anything, such as training other teachers in the school, setting up a library — it depends on what the students require the most.

Fellows are paid a monthly stipend of Rs 16,000, and a housing allowance where needed. Nearly half of them are placed in government schools and the rest in municipal schools. “We are less concerned about the type of school and more concerned about who is in the school. Right now our focus is on urban slum children. In the cities the kids go to either the lowest income private schools or municipal schools,” says Shaheen.

Parents' reaction

When mining engineer Arora told his parents that he was going to become a Teach For India fellow right after his graduation, their immediate reaction was, “Why do you want to spoil your career… you can always do social work, first become rich.”

Arora, however, realised that “you can never be as rich as you want to be. Nothing will ever be enough — if you have a BMW, you'll want a Rolls Royce.” Today, of course, his parents are content to see him happy.

Success stories

Swaminathan beams as he talks about Kajal, a student who used to be very withdrawn, depressed, never smiled or participated in class activities. Her Class I teacher told Swaminathan that she never spoke the whole year. “Everyone I spoke to said something was wrong with her and advised me to take her to a hospital to check for learning disabilities,” he recalls.

He visited her house in Dharavi and found her large family crammed into a small living space. Paying extra attention to Kajal, he encouraged her by giving star stickers even if she wrote just one word. Kajal, who didn't know the alphabet and could only draw in Class II, “slowly started to change and, eventually, was a lot happier to come to school. She started speaking more in English, participated in class activities and has not stopped writing. She writes pages and pages in her diary now.” In fact, for every visitor who comes to Swaminathan's classroom, she immediately writes a full-page ‘Thank you' letter, complete with colourful drawings.

“Now teachers who see Kajal say: ‘We can't believe it is the same kid; did you take her for some medical treatment?' So I tell them she just needed a lot of love and belief in her abilities.”

rhea.l@thehindu.co.in

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