So the rains are here finally - this time a little later
than always. A new monsoon season always reminds one of their new academic year
in school. Everything new (more often than not) - new standard, new classroom,
new class teacher, new textbooks, a new life so to say. It applies to us as
well. After a month long May vacation, we also come together in June to gear up
for our next year ahead. We also have new aims and to-do lists to conquer.
In May, when we did our final tally before heading on
our individual vacations - this is where we stood.
So many 4,801 schools have been reached so far, touching
the lives of 2,81,745 children.
This
is where we stand now. But what lies ahead?
Are
we just looking at increasing numbers or creating quality as well?
We are looking at both really!!
Of course, we want to increase numbers - not just to
please our eyes when we see it on paper - but to please our hearts with the
feeling of having done something worthwhile and positively touched the lives of
so many children. These children are our tomorrow. And if we need to make this
place better, we need to make their lives better. And education is the single
most powerful tool to bring about this change.
But what else is it that we want to do, that we
haven’t been doing so far?
We want to create a self sustaining educational change
- so that the schools and teachers function more efficiently and creatively on
their own, without us having to be in the picture to monitor them as such. And
monitoring is not our role. Our sole role is to provide a solution, which we
have in the form of these DVDs/pendrives. But how to use this content more and
more effectively, we want to leave to the teachers. This will ensure that we
can use our existing man-force to reach further, remote areas of Maharashtra. The
entire state is facing a crisis where the vernacular education system is losing
its hold. And we need to act faster at this point.
Keeping all this in mind - to begin with - we have
started our online help centre. Everyone, even in the most remote areas, are
now equipped to use the internet. Maybe the language is the barrier, but
internet they are aware of. To overcome the language barrier, we have a
parallel communication setup with everything in Marathi(Give the link) as well.
RESOURCES FOR THE TEACHERS - We will work on this more
extensively this year so as to provide one click solution for all the queries
and problems. It will also act like a community where all teachers and schools
can come together to share ideas and come up with new solutions for the
existing problems.
Other than the online support, we want to make our
chain of facilitators and NGOs stronger. We will organise more focused
trainings in the remote areas and ensure everyone is well aware and equipped to
follow the changing trends. In case you are a group of teachers somewhere, and
want us to arrange a training for you, please feel free to contact us. We are
more than happy to help.
A specialised team is also working to create more
content. Currently we are working on creating DVDs for Standard 5 of the
Maharashtra Board.
I end this post with the hope that next year, around
the same time, when I write about the progress-o-meter, I have all these
pointers ticked plus a lot more to share.
