Hera Shakil
Age: 22

“I joined Teach for India (TFI) when I was 20-years-old right after I completed my graduation. I was sent to south Bangalore to teach slum children in a dilapidated school for an assignment. It just clicked; the first class was a turning point in my life and I thought I could take this up professionally for a while. I recently completed a year at TFI. When I’d applied for the fellowship, there was a lot of pent up frustration in me. I was this idealistic 20-year-old who thought that education was the answer to everything. I wanted to make quality education accessible to underprivileged children and I thought that TFI served as a perfect platform for that. Frankly, the fellowship’s quite tough. There are times when I start my day at the school by breaking up fights between students, or talking to a father who refuses to send his daughter to school. Sometimes I walk in to the classroom to see that the blackboard’s been broken, and the fans have been smashed. But, within five minutes of entering the classroom, things start getting better. One of the students will give some wisecrack answer, or one of them will take ownership of conducting the morning meeting, or the class goes absolutely seamlessly and you can see happy faces of all the kids because they learnt something new. Two of my students are dyslexic, it makes me immensely happy when I see them solving complex maths questions. There are also days when I’m unwell and these kids share their small portions of food with me and feed me with their own hands. They also keep tabs on whether I took my medicines on time. So, there a million things that go right and wrong almost everyday. But, no matter what, these kids show up each day and are hungry to learn new things. Also, the idea that I need to be someone these children can look up to, pushes me to be a better person. This one time, I was explaining the meaning of ‘idol’ to the class. One of my students, called Anshika, raised her hand and said ‘Like you are my idol’.”

– As told to Tania Goklany.