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Student Activities >>
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RISE - NSS
Students are so quick and so right, to suspect a fatal
hypocrisy in people who live without slightest relateion to what they
know, and whose texts are wholly divorved from his life, from human
life. This sense grows out of an awareness of life's many possibilities
either to act against or in harmony with the physical needs and the
spritual hungers without which a person is neither alive nor human. This
sense establishes a harmony. Out of both the struggle and reconciliation
come the words and acts that reveal. Not to live life meanly that would
define it. Nor to squander it - that would define it at the other
extreme. This style would be based on admiration for the direct
attainment of a foreseen end.
For the past six years some of us at IIT Bombay have been
experimenting and have experienced this feeling through the programme
knows as RISE (Remedial Instruction for School Education) - NSS.
Introduced six years ago purely as a voluntary act, this activity
popularly known in the campus as RISE also includes the NSS. Involving
on an average about a hundred student volunteers a year, the programme
includes boteh the NSS participants in the first and second year as well
as those undergraduate and graduate students who join purely out of an
interest. So far batches of student volunteers have served and developed
the programme into an institution well recognized by teh surrounding
school system and the parents.
The programme has helped many students to become clearhanded about
what they wish to do. It has given them a chance to examine oneself and
one's capacities and sensitised them to their responsibilities and to
the community in which they live. The objectives of the RISE programme
are two fold:
- To provide the IIT student an opportunity for meaningful
constructive work and through this work to develop a sense of
commitment and sesitivity to ones' surroundings.
- To provide remedial teaching in basic sciences and Mathematics to
the children of class IV and III employee of the campus who are
presently studying in varous schools. It is the general experience
that children belonging to this group either stagnate or grop out of
school. Since many of the children cannot cope with their studies and
have to compete with children who come from families with better
educational background, they simply lose interest in school in general
and in education in particular.
The classroom coaching involves a careful selection and matching of
3-4 students of the same class, beginning from sixth standard to twelfth
standard, to a student-volunteer. The classes for the upper standards
run for four envenings in a week and two days in the week for the lower
standads. Teaching is remedial in approach, and interest-sustaining in
method. It is supplemented by science programme, film shows, field trips
and through the lending of a small collection of books that would raise
the interest and motivation of children. A close coordination is also
maintained with parents; to enable them to understand the magnitude of
the problem faced by their children.
The reaction of the chilfren to the care and attention given by the
volunteers has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Sustained efforts by
the student-volunteers have helped prevent stagnation and drop outs.
Some have even gone over to join the top ten percent of their schools
best. This in a limited way it is believed that the RISE-NSS activity
has been able to stem this problem. This abobe all has helped the
student volunteers to understand themselves.
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