- Saturday, May 11, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
AT a time when the student community has suffered due to prolonged closure of schools because of the coronavirus pandemic, a teacher in a small tribal village in eastern India has taken initiatives to bring back boys and girls to schools in a bid to reduce the gap in learning.
Deep Narayan Nayak, a 34-year-old teacher in the village of Joba Attpara in Paschim Bardhaman district of the eastern state of West Bengal, has turned walls of houses into blackboards by painting them black and roads into classrooms to teach children for the past one year. He took up the responsibility to teach the kids after the local school shut down owing to Covid-19 restrictions imposed across India in March 2020, Reuters reported.
“The education of our children stopped ever since the lockdown was imposed. The children used to just loiter around. The teacher came and started teaching them,” Kiran Turi, guardian of one of the children who learns with Nayak, told Reuters.
To the grateful villagers, Nayak is known as the “Teacher of the Street” and he teaches around 60 students everything from popular nursery rhymes to the importance of following Covid protocols like wearing masks and washing hands.
While schools across India have gradually started opening since last month despite the speculation that a third wave could hit the country, experts have been urging the authorities to fully open educational institutes to prevent further loss of learning for the children.
In a survey carried out by a scholars’ group in August which covered nearly 1,400 schoolchildren, it was found that only eight per cent were regularly studying online while 37 per cent were not studying at all. Around 50 per cent of the students were not able to read more than a few words. Most parents wanted the schools to reopen as early as possible, it said, the Reuters report added.
It cited Nayak expressing concern that his students, most of whom are first-generation learners and whose parents are daily wage-earners, would drift away from the education system if they didn’t continue to go to schools.
“I would see children loitering about the village, taking cattle for grazing, and I wanted to make sure their learning doesn’t stop,” he told the news outlet.