Dear Diary,

Today I am writing something very different than what I usually write about.  This day marked my first experience as an educator, as a teacher volunteer or anything that you would like to call it. After all these years of being and becoming a student, I got a chance to experience and understand the other side of the story, the story of being a teacher. 

I woke up quite early as I was anxious, there were so many lingering thoughts in my head about what to expect, which age group will I be dealing with and how exactly am I supposed to start a conversation with the students.  To my surprise as soon as I reached the community and met the kids all the anxiety was gone, the children were so excited at the thought of meeting someone new that it made me feel at ease too. Before I could settle in and start the conversation the introduction was already initiated by the students, they were curious to know about me, how long will I be teaching them, did I get some treats for them or not and so on.  

Fortunately (as I thought), I got primary students from 1-5 grades and I thought it’s actually not difficult, it’s easy as ABC. Little did I know how tough can ABC be when it comes to teaching it. As I was getting to know the students I observed it was a diverse batch, there were some students with intellectual & physical disability as well. For the first time, I realized the importance and need for inclusive education. In my days as a student I can’t recall having a classmate with any kind of disability. 


Talking about inclusive education on policy level or in our day to day conversations is easy but doing that in your actions is much difficult. You need to be inclusive in your thoughts first in order to make the students understand its true meaning and to behave in an inclusive manner with their classmates. I could see the way children used to tease those kids, they used to laugh at them. The child with the intellectual disability didn’t understand what I was teaching and tried his best to communicate with me. He used to share his drawings with me, and all I could do was smile and praise him and encourage the rest of the class to clap for him in order to boost his morale. He used to get upset by all the teasing but having a conversation about it with the rest of the students helped a little. 

That one month with the kids made me reflect up on so many things that can be a part of our school curriculum and how the perceptions of the teachers can be changed around disability, more so around inclusivity. Moreover, we conduct so many teacher capacity building trainings, I believe teacher trainings should be done in aspect of inclusive education as well where a bigger challenge of including children with disability is there. The type-casting of students as ‘others’, is discriminating in itself. It hampers the child’s mental health and self-confidence to a great extent. 

I realized the hardships of being a teacher but at the same time I got to see how much we get to learn from our students as well, the children were such dedicated learners in spite of all the mockery and teasing, they knew how to put on a smile in the face of adversary. I discerned that inclusion is basically the acceptance of what it is and how it is without any questions, we as teachers have great potential to make the people around us realize that and ensure we accept our students without any biases and help them explore their full potential.