About 70 pairs of eyes peer out expectantly from behind desks in a small classroom at the Mumbai Urdu School in Gaondevi Dongri, Andheri West. It’s approaching 1 p.m. and though official school hours get over at 12:30 p.m., the classroom is packed with boys and girls from Class IX and X, for an after-hours class. Their attention is focused fully on two 18-year-old girls from America, near identical twins, with whom they are about to begin a journey of learning.
The event may be a novel experience for the assembled students, but for Gayathri and Gowri Rao, who have come from Minnesota, US, it is a practised routine. Over the past two years, the twin sisters have volunteered for a novel teaching programme where they spend a few weeks teaching students in a school in India and then continue the process through Skype once they return to the US.
Gayathri and Gowri first joined as Student Social Ambassadors of the Indian Development Foundation, a Mumbai-based non-governmental organisation (NGO) that has an education sector initiative called Bal Gurukul.
The Gurukul provides after-school education for children in various schools in rural and slum areas across the country, and is especially meant to help slow learners.
A long engagement
The sisters have been committed to the cause for a few years. It all began when they were on a vacation to Bengaluru after their Class XI exams. They started their first project in IDF’s Carmel Bal Gurukul run at St. Anthony’s Higher Primary School, Jayanagar, Bengaluru. The sisters spent a few weeks teaching kindergarten children Math and English.
After going back home, they wanted to get connected to the Bal Gurukul students using technology, and so came up with a method for funding.
The sisters requested their mother to prepare sweets and savouries during Diwali, sold them at the University of Minnesota. The proceeds from the sales were used for buying a laptop and getting an internet connection for the Bal Gurukul. They taught English to the students in Carmel Bal Gurukul for a year using Skype.
“The time difference was not too difficult to manage,” says Gowri. “It was from about 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. there, which is about the beginning of the day here.”
The sisters have recently been admitted to the University of Chicago but have deferred admission till 2017 to come and teach in more Bal Gurukul schools in India. After two weeks of teaching at a school in Leh Ladakh, they will now teach in two schools in Andheri.
The Mumbai experience
The experience in Mumbai, Gayathri explains, is already significantly different from what they have encountered so far. “To start with, the classrooms in Ladakh only had about 10 kids each. Also, we were basically teaching children at the pre-primary level; the same as we were doing in Bengaluru.”
At the Mumbai Urdu School, the twins were for the first time teaching students at the high school-level, but the experience wasn’t necessarily daunting.
“The students seemed to warm up to us immediately,” says Gowri. “We have a slightly different teaching plan because so far, we were teaching children basic reading and comprehension. Here we are going to focus more on how to get the students to speak and write better with the English they have already learnt.”
Like with the other schools, Gayathri and Gowri plan to continue the teaching sessions by Skype once they return to the US. “We will probably have to split the class into smaller groups to make that work because we usually conduct sessions by asking individual questions,” says Gayathri.
Both Gayatri and Gowri, along with their parents, lived in Mumbai for two years when they were growing up, as well as in Dubai and various cities across the US. The sisters say they were always interested in doing volunteer work in India and had identified teaching English in smaller schools as the ideal way in which they could make a difference.
“The two years that we have been teaching kids from the school in Bengaluru have been really rewarding,” Gowri says. “It’s great to see how kids who didn’t know much English when we started now don’t have much difficulty even following the reading of a book when we do our Skype sessions.”
A similar journey for the twins is about to begin in Mumbai.
On its part, IDF is constantly on the lookout for people who can volunteer to teach in any location in India as part of the Bal Gurukul programme, says Dr. Narayan Iyer, CEO and national coordinator. For now, it’s only impediment to expanding is technology that can broaden the pool of potential volunteers.
“We have been trying to expand the programme and already know some people in the US who would like to volunteer to teach, but we are working on getting more Gurukuls connected to the net,” says Gayathri.
An earlier version of this article mistakenly named the sisters as Gayathri and Gowri Das. Their surname is Rao. The error is regretted.
