Inspiration

A glimpse in the life of 3 educators bringing about a change

Here is a look into the lives of 3 educators who are mapped on different ends of the spectrum in terms of education provided, salaries taken home, students catered to. Yet all these 3 are bound together by the commitment to bring about a change in the social fabric of the nation by bringing about

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We have all encountered educators in our lives, whether on the other side of the bench or as parents. However, have we ever spared a thought for the lives of these people who dedicate themselves to shaping and moulding the future of the country? Have they taken this profession out of their own free will? Or was it circumstantial? What drives them to tirelessly go to the same institute and repeat the same lessons years on end?

Today we bring to you a zoom-in of the lives of 3 professionals from the education industry. For these people, the pen is indeed mightier than the sword and they are using it to change the world one educated child at a time.

Of course to stay relevant they too have reinvented themselves to go beyond books as the gen-next is latching on to apps, online platforms, even videoconferencing to prepare for the future.

We spoke to 3 professionals—a schoolteacher, a private equity investor turned educator and a coaching institute’s managing director—about how they use technology, communication and the power of words and symbols to motivate and educate.

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Anoop Parik

Let’s meet Anoop Parik, 30 a school teacher at the Shree Geeta Vidyalaya, Mumbai. This gangly man spends most of his days shuttling between the classroom and the football field. He teaches English and history and coaches the students in football.

The Journey

His journey is a remarkable one where, after completing his schooling in Kolkata, and graduating from the Wooster college in Ohio, US in 2009, he went on to work as an admissions counsellor for the college, posted first in California and then in Bengaluru. “I had to persuade prosperous young South Asian students that they should go and study at Wooster College. It was a well-paid job, but I didn’t enjoy it. It became monotonous and was more about marketing than education,” says Parik.

In 2011, he applied for and got selected for the ‘Teach for India’ fellowship, a 2-year programme where fellows work as full-time teachers, teaching children from low-income communities. His posting was at the Shree Geeta Vidyalaya, a private school in the slums of far-off Govandi in Mumbai, earning a monthly stipend of Rs.24,000. “I had never worked as a schoolteacher before and I didn’t know what to expect. I came in the first day; the classroom was a low, tin-roof shed made of bamboos. The roof leaked, sometimes a monkey would come into the class. But by the fifth day, I started loving every bit of it,” he says.

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Even when Parik’s official stint at Teach for India ended in 2013, he decided to stay on. “I couldn’t desert my kids (the students he taught were then in class VI). I decided to see them through Board exams at the least.” His class of 59 students will take their class X exams in 2018.

A typical day for Parik includes walking 3km to school, where classes start at 7.30am. In class VIII A, Parik begins to read out from Faces In The Water, a book on female infanticide by Ranjit Lal. This is one of 2-3 books outside the curriculum that Parik picks every year.

Lunch is generally with the children, sitting together on the floor and chatting. While school finishes at 12.30pm, Parik and many other students will be back at 4pm for football practice.

“You need to be theatrical, need to know your subject and talk about it in a way that catches the imagination of the class,” he says.

Does it pay?

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Admittedly, teachers at Shree Geeta Vidyalaya don’t get paid to sustain a life in a metropolis like Mumbai. They get paid a measly Rs.6,000 a month; many supplement their salaries with income from tuitions. Parik teaches creative writing and English twice a week at the Chembur centre of The Writers Bug, a privately run children’s writing programme. He manages to earn Rs.20,000 a month.

Praveen Tyagi

At 41, Praveen Tyagi is the MD of IITians PACE, one of the most venerated and sought after preparatory class for the premier engineering entrance test in the country.

Tyagi hails from a farming family from a village called Morta, near Ghaziabad. The family was financially weak but Tyagi’s father was determined to give his 8 children a good education and all of them ended up studying at DPS Ghaziabad. In fact, Tyagi went on to study at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, in 1994, taking up physics.

The Journey

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His journey was sheer providence backed with the ability to recognise the opportunity and work on it. During his internment at Mumbai’s Bhabha Atomic Research Centre as an IIT student, many students would seek guidance on IIT entrance exams. He recognised the potential and a year later, in 1998, he started his own coaching classes in a rented small room on the first floor of a ramshackle building, opposite Andheri railway station and today he runs 66 centers across India.

Today, IITians PACE coaches 15,000 students for engineering and medical entrance exams, employing 400 teachers, 200 of whom are IIT graduates themselves. A few centres are even serviced through videoconferencing. Tyagi is particularly proud of one such centre in Akola in Maharashtra, where large numbers of students have cleared their engineering entrance exams depending only on videoconferencing for coaching.

A typical day in office includes meeting the senior team—his brother Kuldeep, who handles the day-to-day management of PACE, and the other managers. Today PACE also runs 8 junior colleges that are affiliated to the Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Education, where students can enrol for classes XI and XII or avail of coaching for their entrance exams. This “integrated” approach is fast becoming popular, and a high percentage of these students make it through their engineering and medical entrance exams.

But like all competitive exams many students don’t make the cut. Of the 15,000 students who enrol for coaching every year, only around 1,000 clear the exams. “It’s a challenge, but we try and see if we can find ways to make the weakest students the most productive they can be,” says Tyagi, who works with his team on monitoring and counselling students.

Understanding the potential role of technology in the months and years to come, Tyagi consciously takes out time for the development of educational technology. “I have a team that has developed Physics Kombat, Maths Kombat and Chemistry Kombat, a series of science-learning apps for high-school students. These are currently in the beta stage, but are available for free download on the Google Play store,” he says. He believes the future of education lies in technology.

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Does it pay?

Tyagi feels that as a teacher, you need dedication, you need to be a good communicator, and inspiring. “I pay my teachers salaries between Rs.20-50 lakh a year,” says Tyagi.

Ashish Dhawan

Of the 3 educators profiled here, Dhawan straddles the entire spectrum of teaching—from school to college. Only until 4 years ago, he was a PE investor. Today, he is the chairman of the board of management at Ashoka University in Sonipat, Haryana while handling the Central Square Foundation (CSF), his venture philanthropy fund that works on improving the quality of school education.

The journey

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Dhawan acquired his stripes at the Ivy League studying economics and applied math at Yale University, US, and completing his MBA from the Harvard Business School. He worked at investment bank Wasserstein Perella in New York (1992-93), and then at MDC Partners, a holding company (1994-95). While in New York, he had an informal brush with teaching in Harlem, where he volunteered to teach mathematics to children from low-income families. Returning home to India in 1999, he started Chrysalis Capital (now called ChrysCapital), a private equity firm that currently manages $2.5 billion (around Rs.16,500 crore) worth of investments.

In 2012, Dhawan decided to step down from active management at Chrys to give more time and focus to education, as he strongly believed that technology and an entrepreneurial methodology could help improve the quality of education for India’s 240 million-plus school-going children. The foundation has since built up quite an enviable repertoire of work including designing teacher-training schemes, helping in merit-based selection of school principals, partnering with Khan Academy for language-teaching, running pilot programmes in schools using technology to improve learning, working with the Union and state governments on improving the quality of school education and last but not the least worked with social entrepreneurs as well.

A day at work: Dhawan has just returned from a fund-raising trip in the US. Ashoka University needs to raise Rs.2,000 crore by 2020 and Dhawan and his team feel that they are on target so far.

Right from the start Dhawan has been a data man, and research on the educational system forms a big part of the CSF’s activities. A pan-India study by it and partner organizations last year found that only 29% of the 2.1 million school seats reserved for disadvantaged children were being filled.

Giving the matter its due urgency, Dhawan dived deep into it and made a presentation to the Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav recommending ways to fill all the seats reserved for disadvantaged children, starting with a simple, common admission form for multiple private schools that would be made available through anganwadi (childcare centre) workers. Yadav was enthusiastic. Dhawan says he will continue to work on this with the CMs of other states.

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At heart he is still an investor of sorts, giving grants to social entrepreneurs in the education sector. His foundation even runs an Accelerator programme, called Edcelerate, which offers grants and support to ventures in the field of education. Dhawan himself steps in the shoes of a guide when dealing with entrepreneurs who run educational start-ups, such as LeapForWord, an English-language teaching programme.

Dhawan says, “To be successful, it’s important to develop empathy, to be able to earn the respect of people who work in non-profits. They can be sceptical of somebody who is just a corporate guy coming into their world. But being transparent and data-driven has helped”.

Does it pay? At the CSF, starting salaries range from Rs.4-6 lakh a year. At Ashoka University, salaries for professors start at Rs.18 lakh a year.

All the 3 educators profiled here hail from different financial, cultural and educational backgrounds. But one strong thread unifies them, the passion to bring about a change, a dent in the social fabric with the help of education. Each of them in their special ways is making a change which will surely reflect in the future of India, Remember it is only kindled spirits that have the power to light up the way for others.

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