World Teachers Day
“I am Salma Akhter and since 2011 I have been working as a teacher in The Sreepur Village school. I started my teaching career as a community teacher and after that I joined The Sreepur Village. My dream has always been to work with underprivileged people and that’s why I am here.
I feel proud to be a teacher, because teaching is a respectful profession. I believe I can help change a nation, I can share my positive thoughts with the children. I love children, when I teach them I feel like I am their mother full of care and love.
I would like to take this opportunity to tell you about one of my pupils named Pinky. At 12 years old she couldn’t read and write, but I have since taught her letters, how to write and read so now she can read and write and is studying in grade six.
When you work with children, you put yourself in their shoes. I always try to be the best teacher for my pupils. In my life, my students are my best friends.
With this profession there are some challenges like controlling the children in the classroom, understandably some of the children struggle with their behaviour so managing them can be challenging.
I want to be a good teacher and I want to build a school where underprivileged children can receive a high quality education.”
The Sreepur Village school takes children in a variety of classes like pre-school, grade one to five and also in high school according to their age and educational competency. The school is running with block teaching* without formal examinations. One teacher is responsible for one class and monitors each pupil's learning through regular assessments.
To meet the governmental standards and The Sreepur Village’s educational goals many kinds of co-curriculum activities like music, art, dance, games & sports are included. Our education program aims to bring positive attitudes into each person’s behaviour by implementing extra activities, like token economy, appraisals, discipline committee, special education teacher and a school council. The Sreepur Village school also arranges silent reading, rapid reading, story reading, and hand writing and creative writing to increase the reading and writing skills of all their pupils.
Over the last two years, The Sreepur Village has implemented block teaching into the school. For the first year of block teaching the teachers used many kinds of visual learning materials with regular materials, methods, and a self-prepared syllabus with the weekly and monthly target. According to the IPT method (input, practices, tusk) the school prepares a lesson plan format and this year teachers conducted 80% of the class with a written lesson plan. In lieu of the examination system the school uses continuous and regular assessment tools and at the end of the year the students will be promoted as per the grading grids.
*Block teaching is a style of teaching where lectures, tutorials and other forms of teaching are provided in an intensive block, sometimes as short as 1 week and student learning is compressed, typically with students studying only one course at a time.
In The Sreepur Village there are 13 teachers and one education coordinator. Their monthly salary is on average 15,000 taka, which is approximately £144 per month. If you would like to donate to our school programme and help give more impoverished children an education then please click here.
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