Ripples on the brain

Ok, so another term ends and I have a sort of a mini break. Actually this time the break is only for two days as I have Macroeconomics & Policy Instruments on Saturday and Sunday. And that is also the reason I’m not on Charminar Express right now (to home). I’ve lot of things to do/submit these two days that I don’t think even those days can be called breaks.

I’m pretty excited with another thing that I am working on right now. There’s a competition called the GSVC (Global Social Venture Competition) in which I am planning to participate with my team. Initially I wasn’t interested in it, but when I learnt that somebody was working on Learning Disability (LD), I made my decision to join the team. That was 3 weeks ago. We got a few acquaintances in Hyderabad, a psychologist, an entrepreneur doctor, his subordinate and a few others. We started off wanting to do something for LD in Hyderabad. Initially we thought we will talk to all the schools here, make them aware of this problem if they’re not already, get them to commit certain teachers from their school who can work on this (help their school students who have some form of LD) and establish links between the schools so that they interact and make this model work.

It was a hazy plan, but good enough to start somewhere. By accident we met one Ms. Gauri Reddy, a psychologist (I think), who was interested in this. Apparently, she has also been trying to get something started for LD in Hyderabad and had not been successful so far. She gave us some thoughts that took us away from our intial plan. She told us that schools will not be interested in either committing their teachers’ time or in getting them an additional qualification because the teachers don’t have the time to even complete the syllabus for the year and moreover, they will always be apprehensive that the teachers will move out if they get any additional qualification. She also said that she’d encouraged some teachers from the city schools to get trained in LD (teaching LD students requires some special training), but they were all fragmented now and hence, she wanted to us to open a centre so that she could bring all of them together and do something. The centre will mainly do three kinds of activities - 1. Assess children and find out if they have the disorder through counsellors, 2. Train school teachers from time-to-time and encourage them set up such centres at their school and 3. Help out students with LD with some additional training through the voluntary teachers who will devote some time to the centre. Now we hadn’t thought about this at all. This was a huge investment for us in terms of time.

But after that meeting, we were convinced that this was probably the way to go. We then met Dr.Niraj from the MedRc who specializes in making digital education materials (I can talk a lot about this man, but I’ll reserve that for my next post). He said he’ll also help us in some way if we start a centre. It was a coincidence that MedRc conducted an awareness session for the city school teachers on the 19th of this month. We were invited to that session and were asked to make a presentation “to set the tone” (as Dr.Niraj’s subordinate, Ms. Surekha put it). One of my team members, Anita, made that presentation and we used that session to collect some information as to what the teachers think should be done. We asked them, through a survey, if they think a new centre in Hyderabad for LD will be useful and assuming one is started, if they’ll be able to provide some help.

We will be collecting the survey results sometime this week to know how many of the teachers are interested in such a centre and in helping us out. We need to really think about what we will be doing next. The more I think about it, the more I get confused as to what to do! If the teachers have been positive about their help, should we work on starting the centre? We plan to get some corporate sponsorship intially as seed capital. For that we need to register the centre (at least that’s what my friend tells me). Assuming we get some corporate sponsorship (we haven’t worked on that so far), do we start a new centre or do we ask one of the centres in Chennai, the Alpha-to-Omega, which I’m told does a phenomenal work in LD there, to open a centre here assuring them of our intial support? Dr. Gauri Reddy is positive that she’ll have some resources to man the centre initially until we get some professional and regularly start training teachers. Do we go ahead with her assurance? Things will probably become clearer this week .