It is teachers day so of course I am going to do a thread on teachers but today I want to share two stories of two teachers I have closely observed and worked with and been hugely inspired by because they will not tell you these stories themselves :)
@InfiniteLowe
@d_nivara

So the first story is set in the Mumbai where Nisha and I taught in the chawls of Mumbai for an year. The school we taught in didn't have a school building and the school had rented some chawls in the slums of Mankhurd and converted them into classes

Nisha and I were lucky because our chawls (classrooms) were right next to each other and in the same corridor. This is the community, lane and corridor we taught in and the two out of the 3 classrooms(chawls) in the corridor were ours (the ones one the far end in the pic).

Now because they weren't classrooms in a school per se but just rooms and chawls, we had families as neighbhours and families living all around us. Now it was the time of monsoons and the monsoons had been torrential that year (Mumbai! of course)

There usually was very bad flooding and our classes got flooded frequently and many times we taught in ankle deep water. But this one time the house on top of Nisha's classroom had severe leakage and the water from their home kept seeping into her classroom

As a quick fix,the trustee of the school had tied a huge tarpaulin under the roof so that all the water leaking from the roof would get collected in the tarpaulin and not fall on the kids in the class. This was her classroom and the roof you see had a tarpaulin hanging underneath

We tried to fight for a more permanent solutions but we had other problems so we forgot about it. One day the tarpaulin which had been slowly filling with water could take it no more and came crashing down with shit tons of water and fell on the kids in the class!!!

The kids were completely drenched, the class was fully flooded (remember this is a small 5ftx5ft house we are talking about so there is no drainage system or anywhere for the water to go) and all our books charts the kids' bag everything got drenched

As a teacher in this situation what would you have done? I know I would have immediately complained to the trustee and sent the kids home and gone and complained to other people about the situation

This is what Nisha chose to do. Without wasting a minute she got all the kids onto the corridor, found place for them to sit, got her blackboard out and hung it in front of the door of my class and taught like for two WEEKS till the issue was sorted

Now my class was also a chawl and quite small and had 20 kids in it and there was no way her 30 kids and my 20 kids would have fit into a chawl

And given how much our kids had to catch up, Nisha decided that getting the kids an education was more important than complaining about a flooded classroom to the trustee and giving up

For two weeks my kids would crawl in and out of the classroom under the board, the kids also adjusted to sitting in the narrow corridor and learning and learning just went on without a break thanks to the kids having an amazing teacher

Story 2: In the second year of my teaching I taught alongside @d_nivara in a government school in Chennai. This school was a significant departure from my class in Mumbai. It was a beautiful space, well-lit, lovely spacious and even had a ground

Aravind was a US return engineer who had never lived in India and I was HUGELY skeptical about him and teaching along side him in a low income community in a government school :D (Sorry da)

But Aravind is one of the NICEST people and the MOST caring teacher I have ever met and here is a story to demonstrate why. The parents of the children we taught in CPS Kottur lived in slums along the Adyar river

These slums were built along the river and were just huts built along the river with very little sanitation, very little space for kids and would get uprooted every monsoons when the river swelled

Many of the childre in Aravind's class came from this cheri (slum) but one child I remember distinctly is Mani. Mani was the child teachers pegged as the trouble maker. VERY naughty, very high energy, very moody, very disinterested in conventional learning

Mani was also a child who every single teacher in the school had given up on. By Grade 4 he had earned many labels from the teachers in the school, none of them positive. Bad family, naughty, dirty, stupid, ill-behaved

Mani was also a child who every single teacher in the school had given up on. By Grade 4 he had earned many labels from the teachers in the school, none of them positive. Bad family, naughty, dirty, stupid, ill-behaved

All of these labels about Mani were 'helpfully' conveyed to Aravind in the first month of his teaching in the school by the other teachers and Aravind was told not to spend much time or take much effort in improving Mani but focus on other 'good' kids

Aravind treated Mani the same as the other kids spending a LOT of time and effort on that child trying to understand him by visiting his house and get through to him but without much success.

Around this time Mani's father fell sick and eventually died (due to drinking and liver failure) and went from attending school occassionally and late to not coming to school at all

On the day that Mani's father died, Aravind and I went to offer our condolences to the family and I remember Aravind stayed with Mani the whole day as his father's last rites were being conducted

For the next 10 odd days after school, Aravind went every single day to Mani's house in the slum and spent hours with the child consoling the child and coaxing him to come back to school and teaching him what he had missed

Every single day Mani said no and wouldn't come to school and every single day Aravind would go to his house to be with him and help him catch up, not once giving up, not once saying i will just focus on other kids

After 2 weeks Mani came to school and he was changed. Still naughty, still smiling a wicked smile but just willing to do anything (even study!) for Aravind who had stood by him through some of the darkest times in his life when no one else had

The thing is, life for children in low income communities is FUCKING hard. I could write an entire book on all the things that kids from high income communities take for granted that poor kids can't even dream of

They dont have electricity, they don't have good food, they don't have place, they don't have time, they don't have educated parents, they don't have books, they don't have educational toys, they don't even have classrooms - but they have dreams

And there is just SO much difference that a teacher can make to help realise all of those dreams of a child irrespective of the backgrounds they come. I keep shouting about this from rooftops but it really bears repeating

A good teacher can FUNDAMENTALLY change a child's life and we don't give good teachers their due or the accolades they deserve. Not that good teachers do it for accolades. They do what they do because they care for the children and care deeply enough to level the playing field

No one appreciated or called out Nisha for what she did. The trustee shouted at her saying she spoiled the image of the school and that he could have gotten her another classroom (he didn't)

The parents of the kids weren't too happy about the classroom being flooded and the kids being taught in the corridors. But Nisha continued to do what she had to do to ensure the kids didn't lose out any more than they already had

The teachers in the school would laugh every day at Aravind for going to Mani's house and wasting time when they knew Mani was a lost cause and wouldn't improve. People in the slum stared strangely at this teacher who came everyday

But they both just did what they knew they had to do and what was right and continued to do it day in and day out because they cared so deeply about every single child in the classroom

I have learnt many life lessons in that one year of teaching alongside Nisha and Aravind but the most important thing I learned was the fact that unless you care deeply about something and are deeply passionate almost crazy about changing it, its not going to change

Happy Teachers day to all the absolutely wonderful teachers out there. Truly the world is a better place because of the work you do and your dedication and commitment <3