Tirupur teacher wins BOLT Award

[dwarakesh]

Tirupur: "I want to work for the mentally challenged children," tells Seena Thevar (37), a teacher of ABACUS International Montessori School, Tirupur, who has been recently bestowed with the Broad Outlook Learner Teacher (BOLT) Award for 2008-09 as the second best teacher in Coimbatore district.

The award has been instituted by Air India under the aegis of its 'Reaching Out Project' with an aim to promote responsible citizenship and preserve the crumbling environment.

This year, Air India joined hands with The Hindu and Dinamalar to give away the award.

Methodologies

Ms. Seena has been selected for the award after the jury took into consideration the innovative teaching methodologies instituted by her both inside and outside classrooms over a decade, which include educating slum and street children as well as children of sex workers in Mumbai.

Proficient in six languages (Tamil, Kannada, English, Marathi, Hindi and Konkani), Ms. Seena has come up in her life through sheer hard work and dedication withstanding the turbulent periods in her marital life.

"The problems in my personal life made me mentally tough," she says.

She is of the view that classroom teaching should never be confined to textbooks alone rather the contents should be linked to 'realities in the environment'.

Ambition

Ms. Seena terms her ambition of working among the mentally challenged children as a 'new saga in her teaching career' in which she plans to come out with some creative techniques to develop the overall personality of such children.

Source: Hindu