What can you do?

Changing lives is exciting :). There is always that one moment of compassion, few words of kindness by a teacher, encouraging talk by a mentor that changes a young life forever.

We have all had such moments in our lives. We hope to create many more such moments in lives of young students. Also sensitize them and prepare them to take on their lives and build something great out of it.

You may join the "Skills for Life" initiative in the following ways:

• Ideas & Content: We have identified key life skills areas that need to be taken up with young teenage students to have a long lasting impact. We need to teach them though stories, simple cases, videos, short films, activities and exercises. We need a lot of out of the box thinking to create all this. Help us by sharing your ideas and building suitable content.
• Implementation: Take some time out on weekdays/weekend and take up a batch of students at SSMI Punjabi Bagh. Create a live impact. What we do at SSMI will serve to build conviction around what we present as a solution to other educators/schools.
• Become an Evangelist: Help us reach out to more schools/educators, introduce our ideology to them. Further we will equip them with guidelines, content and thought process to implement this in their own schools.

Lets change some lives :) Lets create some wonder!

So whats going on?

A song resonates in my head:

Oh Re Taal Mile Nadi Ke Jal Mein

Nadi Mile Saagar Mein
Saagar Mile Kaunse Jal Mein 
Koi Jaane Na...

Things have started coming together for our initiative. 

We have with us an educator who has spent decades into the system but still has a radical thought process and understands system's gaping holes well enough. She will be one of our key mentors for this project. We will also make our first impact in her own school SSMI , an aided school located in Punjabi Bagh. We are already taking workshops with class 8th and 9th student batches of this school (more on this in another blog post). 

We have young professionals who are working in skill building domain and will contribute with their fresh thought and ideas on the experiential exercises, classroom activities on various key life skills that we will bring into the classroom. Through a range of experiential activities, we will ensure that the learning is imbibed.

We have a student group from Delhi University that would make short films and animation videos on the various key life skill themes. Through videos and short films we plan to leave a lasting impact on young minds.

We now have a team of evangelists who will reach out to schools/educators and introduce them to our thought and ideas and will further engage them in later half of this year. We plan to enable them to implement this  in their own schools.

Skills for Life in Simple Steps:

• Build a life skills curriculum
• Create innovative classroom activities, videos, short films
• Implement at SSMI
• Reach out to govt schools/educators and enable them to implement it in their own schools

Hi!

Hi All

Do you agree with the following:

• Current schooling system makes students literate but not educated
• Academic toppers in schools don't necessarily get the best out of life
• Our system doesn't encourage original/creative thinking
• Even good students succumb to pressures and commit suicides or develop tendency to depression
• Critical things such as leadership, dealing with failures, dealing with emotions is not taught at school
• Report card focus has crippled the young thought process
• There is hardly any fun in the learning process

If you agree with any or all of the following, then join us in our effort to create a fun/workable solution for imparting life skills to young students in government schools. 

This blog is aimed at people who are interested in being a part of an initiative that we now call "Skills for Life". The idea to start this blog was to create a forum where continuous thought sharing, updates on the initiative and reaching out to all people interested or associated becomes easier and faster. I had put up the following poster on Facebook a few days ago:

You Never Forget That One Teacher

Responses have poured in since then. We are glad to have so many people interested in this initiative. We now have educators, young school and college students, groups, working professionals all associated and working on this thought.

And we apologize to all those who haven't received a timely response to their queries.

But through this blog, all of you will receive continuous updates on the initiatives and together we can figure out a workable solution and a start to solving what is a critical problem with our ailing  education system.