Mentor India: Fun and Learning with Funglish
“You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.”
We started the class with this amazing saying and then proclaimed this to be incorrect. Why? Because we believe in “Pay it Forward”, and hence the above quote needed a bit of editing!
“You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you, but who can and will repay you by paying it forward to others.” There!
We had sensed immense promise in these rural kids the first time we visited them—who are now like family to us. We run with a belief that they would pay it forward when the time comes.
So with a positive start, we focused on the reading, vocabulary and sentence formation of the kids on week 2. What followed was a marathon of 4 hours, where these kids learnt new handy tricks in our Funglish segment. Fun with English is definitely the way to go!
The previous week, we ended our session by giving some homework, which was to go through and understand Dr. Vijayalakshmi Deshmane’s interview, which we had posted on our website quite a while back. We had provided all the kids with a hardcopy of the same. We were certain that they would relate to this story more than anyone, since it spoke highly about the rural upbringing of a star. So, we discussed this star, who had experienced many challenges while studying medicine because of her poor understanding of the English language. But today, she is one of the most renowned oncologists we have. Her struggle, right from taking up various jobs to beat poverty to persistently pursuing her passion, was something we thought was the right motivation for these bright kids to aim for the sky!
Once the homework was discussed in detail, we jumped right into our Funglish exercises. We used the big black board and filled it up with adjectives with logical segregation. We discussed every word and their meaning. This was followed by a game we came up with. The kids were divided into the same teams as the previous week, but this time we had a new captain. The teams locked horns while we quizzed them for the right adjective usage, and we awarded points if they were able to crack the word and use that adjective in a sentence.
At the end of the fun-filled exercise—that was as much enjoyable for us as them—we gave ourselves a pat on our backs for localizing Funglish and gifting it to rural India! The prize-giving ceremony followed, where the best performers of the day received a 2016 diary. We gave them more homework and promised to see them next Saturday with more exciting content.
A big shout out to our early investors for investing on rural India and for having faith in us. This movement has garnered strong support in a short time span, and we are waiting for you to join the bandwagon!
