Page 17 - Teachers of India Stories

Swarnalatha Nerella
Little Star High School, Adilabad

“Online teaching? Well it’s a lot easier than it sounds!” That is what I
tell everybody when they ask me how do I feel about online classes. But
this was not always the case. There was a time when I could not even
take a screenshot or empty the recycle bin on my computer, but now, I
am troubleshooting IT issues.

Teaching school children online was uncustomary and rarely success-
ful and honestly when I first heard about this plan, I was a little sceptical
thinking how this will pan out. But, as the saying goes necessity is the
mother of all inventions, the need to teach children gave birth to many
unique innovations. ‘Jugaad’ was the word of the day for the last few
months.
It took me some time to realize that being in an online class is different
from taking a selfie or making a video call. That realization gave rise
to may innovations, which now, sound funny, but did help me a lot in
this transition to the digital world. Of the many jugaads, the one I like
the most and very effective one, was to fix my phones back cover to the
wall using a double-sided foam tape. During class I wouldmplace the
phone in the cover which gave the perfect view to students of my face
andmwhat I was teaching. Then this another time, I was in the middle of
a class and had to share some notes with students. This information was
neither on my PowerPoint nor on pdf files. So instantly I had this idea,
I brought my water bottle, placed my phone on top of the water bottle
with camera end hanging in air and facing down at the book which I
was showing to students. To my surprise, this worked perfectly fine.
There were many such other instances, but one that tops all, happened
with my colleague. He had to shift his entire office space to a corner
spot of his porch because that is where he gets a good signal and he can
take classes with less connectivity issues. He says, “If network cannot
come to me, I will go to the network”. I struggled in the initial stages to
get hold of things, tasks became burdensome due to collision of work
for home and work from home. There were times when I was cooking
food for my family and preparing work sheets for students, cleaning the
house and attending conference calls with my team, slicing vegetables