I want to tell you the story of three girls who are students in my class.

Meet Durga, a student at Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya, Ayanagar New Delhi. Her mother works as a maid for a living. She has seen poverty from very close quarters. Durga wants to be a mathematician and a footballer. She enjoys integers and algebra. She is also good at science and enjoys doing experiments and believes that experiments make any topic interesting and engaging. She is always in top 5 kids in her class. She is very determined to not let poverty deter her and wants to get herself and her family out of poverty by becoming a mathematician. She believes a quality education will help her break the cycle of poverty.

Tanya is the second girl I want to tell you about. She is the topper of my class and scores full marks in almost all subjects. She is inquisitive and intelligent. She is very dedicated to her studies. If she is not able to solve a problem, she makes a note of it and gets the problem solved by me or her classmates. She is very keen on learning new topics in the class and practices it until she gets mastery on it. The topic she enjoys in math is fraction because she believes that it can be applied in our daily lives. She explains this by giving an example that if her mother has made a chappati and asked to distribute among 4 brothers and a sister, we can distribute it easily if we know fractions. She aspires to become a doctor one day.
She also participated in various city level competitions like ISCO held at IIT Delhi where she got a 3rd position, Mathathon, a competition to celebrate the love of math, where she got a silver medal. She had also been selected for Cluster level Mental math quiz held at Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya, Aya Nagar.
According to her, many students feel difficult to express their talent in school. Exam and group assignment do not always capture everyone's unique skills or accurately measure the ability to apply skills to real-world problems.

Meet the third girl, Rinky. One of the calmest and smartest girl in our class. She always competes with Taniya for first position in the class. Her all work is completed on time. She studies all the topics in advance which the teacher teaches in the class so that she can ask questions. She enjoys topics like The triangles and its properties in maths most because in this chapter she gets more information about the properties of triangles and how it can be used in our daily lives. In science, she enjoys the chapter Fibre to fabric. Her most interesting topic is how woolen clothes are made from the fleece of sheep.


All the three kids participated at the ISCO Olympiad 2017 conducted at IIT Delhi. They got 3rd position in the competition.

They want to participate in the winter camp named 'Humari Picycle' organised by Aavishkaar. Aavishkaar develops high quality content in science and math for 6th to 12th grades in a language that our learning community understands. Hamaari Picycle is a weeklong residential programme for Middle school students who are fascinated by math and science and dream of themselves as the scientists and mathematicians of tomorrow. It gives students, who believe they have vigor for scientific enquiry, an opportunity to expand their horizon and ride the wave of excitement that the path of math and science offers.

I believe the best way to learn anything is to fully immerse yourself in the subject and ask questions. By doing hands on experience, people learn valuable insights into the subject that enables them to internalize the subject. Similar techniques are used by great educational educators around the world to help students understand the subject (ex: Walter Levin of MIT teaches physics using real life experiments he does in the class https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a0FbQdH3dY). Also knowing something is very different from understanding. It requires people to ask why and live in the answer and continuously ask questions until they have understood what all that is there to be understood. I encourage all readers to watch this video by Richard Feynman on the same topic - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFIYKmos3-s

I want the kids to become the best version of themselves and in order for them to achieve it, I want to set them on a path that focuses on lifelong learning and encourages them to learn by asking questions.