| Sarasa, Government Lower Primary School, Vellanur, Kozhikode |
For 16 years she has been doing unremunerated service as the teacher of Government Lower Primary School, Vellanur, Kozhikode. To the young children who study there, she is veritably a mother more than a teacher. Sarasa teacher means this school itself, they chorus.
Says the headmistress, Pushpalatha.K: “Even in the gurukulam system there is guru dakshina. But Sarasa even refuses a sari for Onam”
It all started 16 years ago, when she had to substitute for a teacher who had gone on maternity leave. “I didn’t want my education to go waste. Everyone in my family is a teacher. When they asked me to come, I just went to give it a try and happened to stay on and teach,” she says.
Her effectiveness as a teacher is illustrated in the story about a physically and mentally challenged student that the other teachers are fond of narrating. Eight-year-old Akhil used to be carried to the school by the parents so that he could spend the mornings in the company of other children. But he refused to go into the classroom and so the distraught mother used to stand beside him in the school corridor. One day he heard the strains of a song coming from one of the classrooms. Going by the trail of music he reached a classroom where a woman was singing to a group of children seated around her.
This became a habit till one day Sarasa invited him to sit inside. He went and sat in the back bench. Once, after she finished singing, she heard a strange voice from the end of the class: “ithu teacher.” It was Akhil. And that was the first time that even his mother had heard him utter a word.
Teaching, it is said, is bringing out the best in the child. Sarasa had demonstrated it in her own understated way.
Courtesy:
Krishnadas Rajagopal (text and photo), The Hindu, September 6, 2012
Contributed by: Administrator
