Volunteer Experience Sharing

Teaching students have always been my passion as I personally feel enlightened on teaching someone. This is particularly because I am quite fed up from the system of education that prevails in INDIA, where we are asked to tell students to cramp the writings and not understand its relevance, its importance and very importantly, as to whether is it really needed for us to learn this? Because of these reasons only, I had only bookish knowledge till I cleared 10+2, after which I got to learn life in detail, and got to understand as to how things work in our country and many other things. At JAAGRITI, I got a chance to experiment my theory that says that many things can be learned outside books as used to happen in Ancient INDIA in VEDIC time. Fortunately, working here, it worked out. The kind of response that I received from students made me delighted and I got to learn a lot from them.

Many a times they made me feel that I need to grow up as a human being as I am not even aware about my surroundings, the trees, the kind of effort that goes in making my one day and, thus, I need to work on it to become a good human altogether. This is quite relevant as after having finished the workshops, I have started running in morning hours for about 3-4 Km(s) daily to strengthen my body from inside. Also, I have started to study about plants and their various species available around us especially medicinal plants, so that if I get to do another workshop in future, I will have a rich resource of knowledge to share with these children. Thus, this experience that I had here, made me a new kind of personality all together.

Working with people of different thoughts, different interests, and having different ideologies for life is always difficult. This I realized while working in a group. This experience made me realize the fact as to why companies must be conducting GD’s and Group activities as part of their selection procedure, because, this is a great way to judge a person’s flexibility with different people around him/her. Also working in a group made me realize one more interesting fact that working without a leader is very difficult. Because none of the group member was termed a leader and we had to work out things and content beforehand by mutual interaction, some points or activities remained a part of conflict even on the day of delivery of the workshop. Thus, in many ways these workshops were a tutor of human psychology to me. In all this was a brilliant effort on part of the organisers of the workshop to provide students with something new, and a rich experience that I will personally remember for my life time.

- Aman Gupta, NSIT