Good News: A Teachers' Day Special

No Mountain Too High

There’s a special reason Robin S. Pukhram, the principal of St Stephen English School, and his colleauges, from Churachandpur, Manipur, travel 120 kms through hilly forests to reach remote villages in the state’s interiors—parent–teacher meetings! Many of the students attending St Stephen live in these hard-to-reach spots. Since reaching the school for a meeting requires expensive, private means of conveyance, the school staff saves them the trouble and cost by making the trip themselves. Pukhram has been conducting these meetings in around 25 villages over the course of one week, since 2018. Having taken charge of the school’s administration in 2016, he has since built a hostel for underprivileged children, offering them low-cost accommodation. His extraordinary efforts have led to a huge uptick in the student population—from 50 in 2015 to more than 545 pupils today.

Source: The Print

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Tablets for the Needy

P. K. Vinod Kumar has been involved in several charitable activities throughout his career.

With online classes gaining momentum, the inability to afford devices to access learning platforms threatens to leave children from needy families behind. P. K. Vinod Kumar, 55, a retired science teacher from Kozhikode, decided to help and offered up his pension money to buy 18 digital tablets for underprivileged kids to continue learning. Generosity is not new to Kumar—during his tenure at Kodal Government U. P. School, he provided school supplies and study material to students from poor families, and set up an annual cash prize for the school’s best-performing student. “Growing up in a middle-class family, I have reached where I am in life with the help of a lot of people; now it’s time for me to pay it back,” Kumar is quoted as saying.

Source: The Better India

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Classes through COVID

A still from Kifayat Hussain’s lesson video (Screenshot courtesy YouTube)

When his village was declared a COVID-19 containment zone in May this year, Kifayat Hussain, a maths teacher at Lamdon Model Senior Secondary School in Leh, worried that he might be exposing his students to the infection. He got himself tested despite being asymptomatic and his results came back positive. Stuck in an isolation centre at Leh’s Maha Bodhi hospital, he wondered how his pupils would manage in his absence. So, he used his time during treatment and quarantine to begin online classes for 9th and 10th grade students via videoconferencing platforms and pre-recorded videos uploaded on his YouTube channel. The hospital, school and Leh administration offered great support to help him conduct his daily hour-long classes over Zoom successfully. “Teaching is not just my job, but my passion. When I take classes, I feel refreshed. I feel like I am fulfilling my purpose in life. I couldn’t let the virus take [that],” he says in a report by Outlook.

Source: Outlook