Inspiration
Nigerian Teacher Just Made Math Easy With Her 5-Minute Online Videos
Basirat Olamide Ajayi from Nigeria is using social media to teach about 2000 students across the world.
Teachers are extremely selfless and it is yet again proved by Nigeria’s 36-year-old teacher named Basirat Olamide Ajayi, who’s providing free online tutorials to about two thousand students from various countries, while the schools remain closed due to the pandemic.
Now a global teacher, she uses a majority of social media platforms like Twitter, WhatsApp and Instagram to share her small yet useful problem-solving clips.
She expressed, “The online teaching has made me feel that I can actually teach the whole world mathematics. On Twitter, people see me all over the world, not only in Lagos, not only in Nigeria. They see me all over the world and that is enough to give me innermost joy.”
There are times when Basirat has to stay active late in the night to attend to the queries of her students, prepare assignments for them and even check their homework. The work has definitely increased and so has her enthusiasm.
“COVID’s positive impact is that we can use technology to teach our students, which I am very, very happy about,” she said.
Initially, Basirat used to demonstrate problem-solving on the white sheets of paper that she’d simultaneously record and upload on social media. Fortunately, her hard work was noticed by a parent who donated a big whiteboard to her.
But not everything is perfect in this story. In Nigeria, there are many families who cannot afford a smartphone or buy internet services to make online education a reality for their school-going kids. To solve the issue, the kind Basirat has volunteered to sponsor these services for some of her underprivileged students.
“There is the problem of slow internet, the cost of data and the uncooperative attitude of parents who were not familiar with what teachers are doing. Some of them don’t even have data to access the class, and that is not giving me joy at all, as a teacher who wants students to be online during the classes,” she said.
Determined to spread her knowledge in mathematics and make kids overcome their fear regarding this subject, Basirat is of a belief that – “The more I give, the more society will benefit from me and people can say ‘Mrs. Ajayi has done this to the whole world.”