Was He Too Generous or Just Out of His Mind to Giveaway $500k to His Fellow Finalists
By: Kavish Kamat, Kk
Tags: Motivation, Inspiration, Life Lessons, Self Improvement, Social Change

Beginning of a teaching journey

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

In 2009, when Disale’s first entered a decayed building sandwiched between a cattle shed and a storeroom, he had never thought that the school could also look like this. The students were all girls from nearby tribal communities.

The orthodox community never prioritized girl’s education, and teenage marriages were common. The lack of interest in education was evident from the mere 2% attendance that the school enjoyed. All in all, the future of the school was in a sad state.

Disale could have easily walked out for better opportunities, as this was just the beginning of his career path. But he was a man on a mission, a mission to change lives of people.

Disale started to analyze the grim situation of the school. It didn’t take him time to understand the problem. There were two major reasons of failures:

1) Girl’s education was the least priority — The village community was indifferent to female education. They were considered homemakers of the future and were told to focus on daily chores like cooking, washing utensils, taking care of the younger ones, and assisting the men in fields. They never considered the capability of education in improving their status in life.

Action

Disale knew that the only way to get girls into the school was to convince their parents. But to change the attitude and an old mentality of parents towards education was easier said than done. He started to do community engagement. In parallel, he also started learning the native language Kannada, to help him speak to these families in their mother tongue. Over a while, the villagers began to consider Disale as one among them, and the trust built up by constant interaction paid off; as parents started trusting him and sending their girls to school. Enrollment in schools started to increase gradually. But there was one more issue to be solved.

2) The curriculum taught was not in native language — The study material used in the school was in English or Marathi, a non-native language for the students who used to communicate in the Kannada language. It meant that the students first had to learn these additional languages to understand the subject. The added burden of learning other languages kept the girls disinterested in studies.

Actions

The first challenge for Disale was to inspire students to keep attending school. To attract students to classes, instead of teaching traditional subjects, he started giving them learning through fun, songs, videos and games, a concept he termed as “Edutainment”. He wanted the girls to enjoy their time in school and thereby impart the habit of attending it daily.

The next task was to remove the language barrier hindering the learning curve. It was difficult to teach new languages to his young students, just to understand a subject. So he had to work the other way round and started converting textbooks into the native language. With his newly learnt Kannada language skills, he converted all books from 1st to 4th grade in Kannada, making it easy for the girls to learn the subject.

The impact of Disale’s hard work has been extraordinary; the school now enjoys a near 100% attendance, and there are no teenage marriages in the village. The school also received the best school award in the district. 85% of his students achieved A grades, and one girl from the village has graduated from university.