Some memories die hard!! I have vivid memories of the wonderful days that I spent in my school. The memories that include me and my friends are mostly on the nicer side of nostalgic scale whereas the memories that have only me and some teachers often tilt towards not-so-nice side of that virtual scale which I invented in last line. With this, I don’t mean that all of my teachers were boring and frightening at the same time. In fact, quite a few were amiable and I was very close to them. Maybe it is not the fault of teachers that they become so frightening at times. Perhaps it is the system that should be blamed. You know how the things work in schools. A lot of homework was pushed down our narrow throats, we were asked to recite the lines of verse and, later, to decipher them, we were made to mug up most of the hard things(at that age, almost everything looked like greek and roman) and if that was not enough to send us dizzying, there were expectations from parents to score first position in class. How many first positions can there be in a class? All except one are bound to get disappointed. I know, those teachers will tell me that it was their hard work that saw me through:-) Anyways, the point I want to drive at is not how they did or didn’t actually make my school days heaven or hell. At the time of those struggles with teachers, I always wondered why can’t someone make a school where they teach us in a nicer way. I didn’t have the exact details of how that nicer school would like, since I was just a kid and, at that point in my life, I used to live in a wonderland where things just happened by magic.
Today I came to know how exactly that ‘nice school’ would look like. I was watching a TED presentation by 2008 TED Prize winner Dave Eggers who creatively engages with local public schools to create a better environment for students. He talks with spellbinding eagerness about how his 826 Valencia tutoring center inspired others around the world to open similar kind of centers. By the way, Dave Eggers is an author whose first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Since then he’s written two more novels and launched an independent publishing house, which publishes books, a quarterly literary journal (McSweeney’s), a DVD-based review of short films (Wholpin), a monthly magazine (The Believer) and the Voice of Witness project. You can visit his website for more information: Once Upon a School.
And here is the video:
Wu Li 