A school called life
Speaker : Shaheen Mistri
Session Moderated by : Krishnan Ranganathan

• I have learned more love and values from the children we served at Akansha and Teach For India. There are so many profound moments of being with kids
• We were at Sughad campus, my mentor Jayesh bhai was pulling a few weeds out of the grass. He looked troubled and I asked why are you so troubled. He said Inside me it does not feel right to pull weeds. Around me, there were many of these little movements that I was able to see in people around me. And I wanted to live with that level of awareness and that level of love.
• For me the all encompassing Value of love feels so important in the world today. Love and acceptance of self, love for people we work with, children we serve, the vision of work we do. Just feel that it can take up further and Makes journey richer.
• I was in search of one big thing that will change education and therefore change the world. Over the years I went from believing I could change the world , change India, change small organizations around me to actually realizing I cannot even change my two daughters and really I could focus only on myself, internally. Its little acts and kind words that add up and over time, overwhelm the world.
• Once we took our children from a slum in Mumbai to a home for elderly people which had elders with physical deformities. It was difficult for young children to go and see that. We asked them to just go and find anyone in home and talk to them. Priyanka, one of the children, went to a lady and started to talk to her with lots of gestures. I realized that both of them didn't have a common language. They both sat together for 1 and half hours, chatted in their own languages with huge smiles and gestures and at the end there were hugs. When we went back to the same home 3 months later. Priyanka had taken chocolate for this lady in one hand but in the other arm she was holding a teddy bear that was very important to her as that represented security for her. When she went to this Old lady, the lady mistakenly thought Priyanka had brought a teddy bear also for her. And so in that moment, Priyanka had to decide, do I give her the chocolate bar or teddy bear also (which represents so much to me)? Priyanka hesitated for a moment and then gave the teddy bear away. I spoke to her in the evening and asked why she looked troubled. It's an amazing thing you did. She said I am troubled that If I really understood compassion I would not have hesitated for a moment before giving the teddy bear. And she was just 14 at that time. When Children grow up practicing the values that they care about, there Is a powerful ripple effect In the world.
• It's actually the Experiences we surround our children with and the role models they have in their life. Children naturally want to do good and be good.
• More than serendipity, for me instinct has been the driver. My heart is usually the driver of how I take decisions and how I live my life.
• Learning doesn't happen in a classroom. Learning happens everywhere. How can learning stop when just 4 walls of the classroom close down? There is something wrong in the system.
• Why does learning only need to happen with a teacher who is in front of you in the classroom? Your teacher can be anybody, it can be someone sitting on the other side of the world or can be a student who is 5 years younger to you. Anyone can teach, anyone can learn. Learning happens from parents, community, the life we live every single day.
• Beautiful African concept of Ubuntu came alive to me. Yes it takes a village to raise a child and it takes a village to educate the child as well.
• Some things are better done in person and some things are better done using technology. If we can find the right blended approach, maybe all children have opportunities that they need.
• For years I have been thinking about collective action, power of community and have always believed in it intellectually and this year I felt it in my heart in a way in which I haven't felt it before. We need to leave our kids with a strong community of people that will help them navigate the ups and downs of life.
• Another aspect of education culture that needs to be a new reality is parental involvement and student involvement in their own education. We see students teaching each other. There is tremendous power in peer-to-peer learning. How do we not lose out on that?
• For many years when I was at work I was worried about kids and when I was at home, I was worried about work. There was a lot of guilt associated with that for a large part of my career. One day I shed that guilt thinking it's not a helpful emotion for my kids and my work. Letting go of that idea that I need to be perfect mom led me to become a good parent i.e by the example of how I lived my own life.
• We all have two sides of us,ordinary and extraordinary. My mentor Anu Aga taught me that when we are too ordinary we have to seek the extraordinary. And when we are doing so many things, we need to pull ourselves to the ground and remember that we are ordinary.
• When a challenge hits you, you always have a choice. You can pick up a magnifying glass, which usually our tendency is. That if you pick up a magnifying glass, you see the problems outside of you and you tend to externalize them. Very often those are real challenges and reasons. But you also have a choice to pick up a mirror. And when you pick up a mirror you look at yourself. You ask yourself what can I do about it irrespective of whether I caused the challenge or problem or not.
• You never graduate from school of life if you can keep curiosity and sense of wonder alive in you.
• Education is about self, about others, country and world. It's really about discovering who you are, discovering what your greatest purpose is, discovering and building the skills to live the life that you really want. It is about the way I am with others in the world but also about opportunities I create for others to unleash their potential. Can education be a playing ground to understand what I want to shift, small or big, and to practice what it means to shift it? Balance of self, other and country is really important in the definition of education.
• One of the hardest things about being a teacher: it's a journey of becoming a better human being and the good part is your kids are there on that journey with you.
• I think what helps our Teach For India fellows is the reorientation and understanding that education is something much broader and much more profound then they potentially thought it was. And understand their role as being very important and transformational to self and the students whose lives they touch.
• Can we create spaces for teachers where they can share their accomplishments and failures? When you are able to do that they are then able to do that in the classroom for the children with the children.
• Guftagu circles hosted by one of the Teach For India fellows brings together a very different group of people for sharing and deep listening. No questions asked. Once a lady who cleaned the floor shared that she was offered by 3 or 4 other schools higher salary but she will never leave this school as in this school everybody looks at her in the eyes and know her name. The principal of the school who was in the same circle teared up as she never realized how important that act was. Can we find simple spaces and circles to really listen to each other without judgement and acceptance?
• Holding the question of what my leadership needs to be to meet the needs of children today is helpful.Think of your classroom as dots with lines connected everywhere. It's not the lines connected to you standing in front of class but you really enabling people to connect lines to each other and help each other.
• The experience that you actually go through matters less than what you take from that experience. Teaching kids how to reflect, how to make sense of things, how to step back, how to choose what they look at.. These skills will become very important.
• There is almost a sense of guilt in focusing on anything longer term when the immediate seems so urgent. Just overcoming the guilt and creating space in your own day to step back and focus on the future really helps. If we don't do it, we push back additional challenges and crises that will unfold in future just because we will not have time and space to prepare for them.

And here is the surprise rap sung by our young volunteers Aum, Simran, Reva and Agastya.



And some memorable quotes from the call --