Connecting With Students - Part Two
About us
We were mostly school students and some college students. With the support of my parents and Mr. G. A. Ganesh, we reached out to rural government schools. The rural government schools are filled with young minds who can be shaped to become great inventors and gamechangers in tomorrow's world. We are in no way superior to the students or the instructors, but as a group, we discussed, debated and learnt a lot about how little we understood although we all have passed, even scored well in lower grades. This gap between the expected knowledge and the amount of knowledge an average student gains is what we tried to target and highlight.
Our plan
We tried to come up with interactive sessions involving games, activities and discussions. This was a harder task than we had anticipated. To provide informative, engaging yet concise sessions to students who are of almost the same age as we were was a difficult task. Keeping in mind their attention span and the kind of cross-perspective we wanted to provide, we drafted our sessions.
These included:
- Personal narratives of the group members that emphasized on
- Decision making
- Good virtues
- Life skills
- Learning vs Understanding
- Overcoming setbacks and failures
- Career options
- Student activities that promoted
- Public speaking
- Art and creativity
- Decision making
- Reasoning and verbal ability
Our events usually included discussion with students regarding the methods of learning and the importance of education; quizzes and other competitions to find talented individuals and direct them; singing and dancing for relaxation. We distributed a pen for each student who participated in the session as a token of gratitude.
What did the students think?
After each event, we would ask the students and the faculty for their valuable thoughts about the session, their comments and suggestions. We could not document the feedbacks as all of the necessary funding for the sessions was spared by the group members who were all of the non-working class. Digital documentation would be a hard task as not every student or faculty would have an electronic device to fill their feedbacks. So, we took the feedbacks as word of mouth and constantly improved on them. Initially, our sessions took as long as 4 to 5 hours. But upon feedback, we brought it down to less than 3 hours. After every session, students were asked if they felt that they enjoyed and appreciated what was told in the session. The teachers and students have always treated us with great kindness and hospitality. I feel much obliged to thank them here.
What next?
Upon writing the first blog, I called few of my old friends and asked if they were still interested in conducting more such events. Some of the old group mates have come back home due to the pandemic and they were happy to jump at the opportunity to meet refreshing, young minds. Now that we have completed schooling, I think we are more suited to offer career guidance and learning advice to our brothers and sisters in rural schools around Hosur. We are all very excited to start working on this again. More details on this will be posted on the next blog in this series.
A small note of gratitude
Here, I would like to thank few without whom none of this would be possible for me. My family: My mother (Hema), father (Neelakandan) and sister (Soundariya); My friends (Abhishekk, Haarish, Prem, Jaahnavi, Nivetha, Chandru, Bhavya, Aravindh, Lavanya, Praveen, Sankruth, Yogesh, Logesh, Binitha, Pavithra and others); Mr. G. A. Ganesh; All the participants of our sessions and all the faculty and helpers who were kind and supportive.
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