Stories that Inspire

Virtual Teaching for rural students

A city born person gets into rural world..

You do not need a visa or a passport – you do not need to travel by aeroplane or a rocket, but just take a train from Mumbai to Dahanu and a rickshaw from Dahanu station to take you to this new World called Kosbad. The road between Dahanu and Kosbad has a  thick jungle on either side with a periodic view of village houses or shops. It is about half an hour ride from Dahanu station. The name of this place of interest is Tarabai Modak Vidyanagari...

The visit to this place is like a pilgrimage. My friends and I are fortunate enough to teach the tenth standard students Science and Maths. Sandhya is the most fortunate of the lot because she got an opportunity to meet and assist Anutai Wagh. For the rest of us, we are just amazed at the achievement of  Late Tarabai Modak and late Anutai Wagh about starting their work way back in 1945. They had the vision and valour to set up an Institution in deep jungle in hostile surroundings. The more I think about it, the more I admire them...

City people like us have a glimpse of village life through books and films. We make create our own picture of the students and surroundings. I was no exception. When I started interacting with them the ground reality was different. They were extremely clean, neatly dressed. Girls had neatly tied their hair and all of them had smiling faces. There were equal number of boys and girls in the class. The children were well-behaved and polite – eager to learn. I would definitely like to give some credit of this to School Management and especially to Mr. Chandragupt Pawaskar, President of Nutan Bal Shikshan Sangh. He takes a personal keen interest in the school and makes it to interact with each and every student as well as takes some classes.

This was our first experience teaching in school and that to in an alien environment. The students were also very shy. They might have got a similar feeling of aliens coming to teach them. Though we spoke Marathi, our accents and their accents were totally different. The syllabus posed the real challenge. In Mathematics, there is a chapter on GST. It is a simple percentage problem, but the students who have never seen any invoice in their life, the examples were difficult to explain. Science had its own set of problems. There is a mixture of Marathi and English. Units in Physics are given in English and concepts are named in Marathi. In lower English, they are expected to know figures of speech, where the students lack severely in common English vocabulary and even do not know how to use a dictionary. I can go on and on. We are taking one challenge at a time and figuring out a solution as we go along. 

At EachOne EnrichOne we have decided to gather our experiences and roll out a project to understand, list and deal with these challenges. Our objective is to ensure that the students get a quality education and learn from the best teachers. To ensure they get access to best teachers who may not be available physically at Kosbad, we are planning to roll out a project for virtual teaching wherein volunteers can teach a subject from the comfort of their homes and interact with the children using technology. We already have the technology set up ready at Kosbad and are now looking for volunteers to support us further. We would like to invite contribution to this project in form of ideas or direct participation. I believe these are common challenges of India’s rural education. We will be using technology like web and video conferencing in this project. We intend to launch this project in January 2019.

Please write to: team@eachoneenrichone.com