A new lesson

A few months ago,Class III A looked like any other classroom in the school–no fans,no water and no carpets to sit on. But now all that has changed. The blue,rundown walls have colourful charts on them. The orange doors and windows of the classroom are left open. In one corner stands a small cabinet full of books,toys,pencils,coloured pens and other stationary.

“ I painted the classroom myself,” says Mohit Arora,the teacher. “The charts are their idea completely.” Arora,25,is a Teach For India (TFI) fellow,who worked abroad with Ernst & Young for two years before coming back to teach underprivileged children.

The TFI campaign,which started two years ago,aims to bridge the educational gap by placing college graduates and young professionals in under-resourced schools,both government and private. It’s a fully paid,two-year fellowship for full-time teaching where fellows include graduates from renowned institutions and employees from big companies across the world–the IITs,Brown University,McKinsey,ICICI and Tata Group,to name a few.

In his first year of fellowship,Arora taught the fourth grade in a Pune school. When TFI started operations in Delhi this year,he moved back to his hometown. He is happy as he finds his job quite fulfilling.

“ I am trying to bring in as many resources as I can for my students… anything to facilitate a better education for them,” he says. When he started in July,most of the girls did not know even the alphabet. Today,they are able to read simple sentences fluently,except a slight stutter now and then.

Twenty years ago,when Wendy Kopp started the Teach For America campaign in the US,she didn’t know she had started a game-changing movement in the world of education. TFI seeks to adapt the American model to the Indian context with the hope of bringing better education to the millions of underprivileged children.

Out of the 24 classrooms in the Pahari school,two are under TFI,one of which is Madhuri’s class,III A. In the math period,the girls learn how to tell the difference between greater numbers and smaller numbers. “Nine or three? Which number would the crocodile open its mouth wider for?” asks Arora. “Nine,nine,” the girls answer enthusiastically.

After the girls go home,Arora talks about how he brings different professionals such as doctors and engineers to interact with them. Recently,he collected some money through a fund-raiser which he used to do up the classroom and build a little library for the students.

“I want my kids to know that there lies a world beyond Sangam Vihar,” he says. “I want them to dream and let them know that it is okay to dream.”

And they are dreaming. Madhuri wants to be a doctor,Fiza wants to join the police and Neha wants to be an astronaut.