Five years after setting up a mathematics laboratory in his school and adopting other technological tools for teaching the subject, government high school teacher Yakub Koyyur says there is still a long way to go to make learning mathematics fun.
“My efforts have brought about a change in about 80% [of the 150] students. There is still a long way to go before the fear of mathematics can be removed and learning can be made fun. We need to inspire students to remove their inhibition and love what they learn,” said Mr. Koyyur, who was among the 47 teachers in the country virtually receiving ‘national award’ from President Ram Nath Kovind on Saturday.
Mr. Koyyur works at the Government High School in Nada village, Belthangady taluk. Chemmalar Shanmugam, headmistress of Kendriya Vidyalaya No.2, AFS (East), Jalahalli, Bengaluru, and Surekah Jagannath, teacher from Government High School, Afzalpur, Kalaburagi, were the other two teachers from Karnataka to get the award.
Mr. Koyyur told The Hindu the COVID-19 pandemic has posed a challenge for teacher to reach out to their students. Apart from holding online classes and sending assignments to children with basic mobile phones, he and other teachers were visiting the houses to teach.
“The concern is about those students who constantly need the teachers’ attention. We are trying to involve such students in activities that will help to overcome the shortfall in their learning following a long gap in classroom teaching,” he said.
The long gap in classroom teaching following the lockdown, Mr. Koyyur said, was the reason for slightly below-par performance of class 10 students from his school.
While his students did well in mathematics, they could not get good marks in other subjects in the SSLC examination.
Mr. Koyyur hoped classes would begin from January. “Three months are enough to prepare class 10 students this year,” he said.
Mr. Koyyur has uploaded about 500 YouTube lessons, with 300 on mathematics alone.
