Every Student is an Entrepreneur - Nibbrati Rathore

What makes a person a hero? Is it the risk they take or the lives they change?

There are people in the world today who are offering hope instead of despair. They are the new heroes who are called entrepreneurs.                                                                   

An enterprise is an ability to see a need in society and fill it in a way that most satisfies the customers and generates profit. But imagine if these profits weren't just money but the improvement of people's lives. Rather than relying on government help, social entrepreneurs believe in the power of human potential; they try to build enterprises that can grow, become self-sustaining, and, most of all can, create fundamental changes in society. The Pahale India scenario also teaches us the same.

When I chose to teach as my career, I realised how students perceive their teachers- "Someone whose job is to make us learn, who works to make the concepts clear to us and more importantly for children, teaching is a teacher's responsibility". But do children actually own up to learning? This is a widespread scenario faced by all teachers at least once in their lifetime. I struggled for a year. And my second year - I thought of creating questions and puzzles as my primary teaching mode. And now I have a bunch of them. I have very diverse puzzles, very different from each other. Because I want more than one student who happens to be good at math to solve everything for everyone, and the others just follow it through. I want everybody to collaborate. The outcome is that my students must have some fulfilment or a feeling of achievement. I want them to believe that they support and help in the team's success. And when they think that they matter, they are ready to work on it. At times some puzzles don't even have anything to do with math:

E.g. I draw two straight lines drawn on a piece of paper and ask the students what they see here?

So these kinds of puzzles do not necessarily need any mathematical concept understanding, but it does require "thinking out of the box". And it has taught my students that if you look at things correctly, you will have this "AHA' experience. 

Now, what happens after this - My students come up with many questions, and then I do not have to work for their attention. 

So in my classroom, every student is an entrepreneur because he identifies a problem, tries to find the best solution, and learns to showcase his efforts creatively. The outcome of such small efforts may seem minuscule, but they are creating a more fruitful learning ecosystem.

To conclude, I would like to mention that when students have no distractions and have positive emotions connected to any subject, it creates ripples of learning, and then the students come and share a common goal - "PAHALE PADHAI".

Ms Nibbrati Rathore

Mathematics Faculty 

Gyanshree School, Noida

The pilot for Power 2 be
This is the first post for our new Learning Program, Power 2 Be, adapted from Highway To Swades and hosted by the author Bhairavi Jani. Read more https://www.happyteacher.in/Power2Be