Ep 4: A Fellow's Pilgrimage - Summer, Slums, & Startups
This is Episode 4 of the series that I am writing to demystify Ed-tech for anyone outside the system.
Ep 4: A Fellow's Pilgrimage - Summer, Slums, & Startups
A Summer in Pune
On a mountain top, somewhere near Pune, Maharashtra.
Around 1:45 pm on a 'flaming' hot May afternoon, she got off the bus a second ago and now she's running towards the hostel mess for her lunch break. "I have been up since 5:30 am", she says "First, I went to a school where I taught a class of 40, and now it's time for me to become a student and sit in a class of 40." She looks at her wristwatch. "But, there is no time left. The lecture starts in 15 minutes and the mess is still 10 minutes away".
She's almost at the door of the mess. "I hope today they have Chinese. I'm fed up with the dal and chawal". It was dal and chawal and yet, she inhaled it. It was all over in 5 minutes. "Time to go to class." She looked at the timetable. "Today's lecture is on Child Development. Hmm. And where?" she moved her finger down the chart. "Tagore hall? Where is that?"
She will attend these lectures till 8:30 in the evening, like yesterday, the day before that, and the one before that. She will do the same tomorrow -- wake up at 5:30, go and teach in a school till 1:00, force-feed herself, and then attend the lectures till 8:30 in the evening -- and she will do it again the next day, and the one after that. She is one of many, almost 500, mostly in their twenties, on this one-month-long pilgrimage called the 'Summer School'.
Who was Pedagogy? What was Piaget?
Mumbai, D-day, 8:00 pm.
The teacher finally called. "What you sent me was not suitable for Grade 3 students. Who explains 'a genocide' to a third grader? And, that picture of the children crying near the rows of graves? It would be difficult for the children to sleep at night!" she pointed out 10 more errors to go with that and then hung up after asking us to do better.
I was the one who had made that plan. I was the one who acted like an idiot too. The chapter in the textbook had a short story from the Rwandan genocide and I had to make an exciting lesson about it. First, I decided to explain the meaning of 'genocide' to grade 3 children. Then, I thought that it would be a great idea to include images and videos of the brutalities of the genocide to add some context and make the lesson more real for these grade 3 children. Two minutes of silence... for me and my logic.
Remember I wondered what Piaget was? And if Pedagogy was a female scientist? Pedagogy was not a female scientist, it was a term. Pedagogy is a field of study that explains how to teach. If I had dug a bit deeper into any book on Pedagogy, in one of its subsections, I would have found a topic called Child Development. There I would have come across Piaget (pee·uh·zhay). A psychologist who devoted his whole life to understanding how children think and what they can understand at different stages of their lives.
I wish I had dug deeper, as it would have stopped me from committing the obvious blunder of 'explaining a genocide to a 3rd grader brought up in South Delhi'.
But as I had explained before, there was no time to sleep, and therefore digging deeper is just one of those fantasies that I can have in retrospect. In reality, the drive to sleep is far more primal than the drive to be curious. So what we did was, we took her feedback, learned from our mistakes, and kept moving.
But, one thing was for certain, we couldn't keep on making such blunders or else there would be a lot of 'churn' -- Startup-speak for your customers giving up on you and leaving. We needed someone who knew something about the alchemy of education.
Summer to Slums
On a bus somewhere on the Pune-Mumbai expressway.
"The last month was crazy," she says as she is traveling back to Mumbai on a bus. "You know, 6 months ago, I was sitting in a lecture hall in my college when these guys visited and said that they were looking for future leaders. People who would define the future of education. I was hesitant in the beginning, but then I said yes to the program."
"And before I knew it, I was on a bus with a bunch of unknowns on my way to the mountains to learn about education, to be a leader" she continued as she reminisced, with a gleam in her eyes. "I'm excited to bring myself to my classroom. I never imagined that I would be excited, going to teach in a government school located inside a slum for 2 whole years. But, things have changed."
"Also I am getting paid for it, 20K per month in fact. But, that doesn't matter much. All I want to do is help my children. Get them to be leaders. Get them to be the best version of themselves."
Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. - Mike Tyson
In the next two years, in that class, what she will experience will be beyond her wildest imagination - she would be shouted at by children; children will openly abuse her; one child will bring a dagger to the class and threaten another child; other teachers in the school will gang up and play politics against her, and she will feel like quitting at least once a week for the first few months.
But she won't. She will persevere, create hundreds of lesson plans, spend almost all of her salary on getting classroom supplies, and keep showing up to change the lives of those children. For those two years, those children will get an excellent education. Then, she will leave, with excellent lesson planning and teaching skills, a dream to be a leader, and a Whatsapp group full of children who call her 'didi'.
Welcome to the wild wild world of 'Teach for India' aka TFI - a non-profit education organization. TFI recruits people, puts them on a bus, takes them to a mountain, and trains them for a month, in what they believe, are the best practices in education and leadership. During this month, also known as 'summer school', the recruits, who are called 'fellows', spend half of their days learning about teaching and the other half applying those practices by teaching a class of children in a school nearby.
After about a month, they leave for another city, where they have to teach in a government school, usually located in a slum, for 2 years, or optionally for 3. Why? TFI believes that this is the way to change education. TFI prides itself in 'creating leaders' and hopes that 'one day all children will attain an excellent education.'
However, TFI could also pride itself in being the best prep school for Ed-techs. Why? There are two reasons I think. One, Ed-tech needs people who understand the alchemy of education - specifically lesson planning and teacher training. TFI fellows know more than a thing or two about that.
Two, TFI fellows are cheap to hire. Their stipend during the fellowship is 20K, most of which they end up spending on the children they teach. So, a 40-50K starting salary is a big jump for fellows and dirt cheap for startups.
Consequently, a lot of TFI fellows end up joining Ed-techs. It is almost impossible to find a startup whose Ed team doesn't have a TFI fellow.
...in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. -Benjamin Franklin
In this Ed-tech world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes, and TFI Fellows.
Slums to Startups
When we needed someone for our Ed-team, the path of least resistance was to hire someone from TFI. So, we did just that - hired a fellow from TFI, branded them as the 'Author' aka Content Developer, explained to them the product and we made lesson plans happily ever after...
No. Not really.
3 months later
"I don't think I can do this. I did not sign up for this. I never get to see the children that I am making lesson plans for. I am not a lesson-planning machine. Are we really educating children or playing a game with them?" she was in pain as she said these words.
"Also, what is this toxic culture? What's with glorifying people who work 24x7? Isn't there a thing called work-life balance?"
"Why is everything about the costs and profits and efficiency and metrics?"
"Consider today to be the beginning of my notice period." And, she left the room.
All of those were fair questions. They made sense. Why couldn't we do all the things that she said? What went wrong?
You see, if you are a for-profit Ed-tech startup, there is a duality to hiring someone from TFI. A duality that has been engineered into the TFI system......to be continued in the next episode.
Disclaimer: From this post onwards, all the stories will be an amalgamation of my own experience, first-hand accounts and documentary evidence. That is, what I will write as a journey of a character will be based on the journeys of different individuals.