Sunday, 9 March 2014

From the teacher's diary: 3: A Successful Entrepreneur

A Successful Entrepreneur


This happened 7 years ago when I was teaching maths to a child with dyslexia. He hated math so much that whenever I taught him percentages or ratio or any other concept in class he would not respond properly and would never open his mouth when asked questions.

Once I was teaching children about sales and concepts related to it. To make this more interesting, I took them for a field trip to a market area to give them an exposure about sales and its practices and asked the children to present their own ideas in class the next day. It was festival time and there was sale put up in a lot of shops. The boy was very excited to be in such an ambience. He jumped in front of a shopkeeper and questioned him about various strategies and ideas that he adopted to attract customers. I was surprised with the amount interest he showed in learning concept of sales. He did not stop there but went on to ask shopkeepers selling different kinds of products.  The next day for presentation, he came up with a lot of ideas that amazed all of us in school.


I started teaching the concept of cost price, selling price and what a surprise he was the first one to come up with the answers. He was alert throughout. When we went further deep into the topic he started showing interest in learning percentages, decimals etc. What difference did a small field trip make and we could integrate the subject so well and it did make a big difference to his life too. 

He is now managing his father’s departmental store and is able to use all the strategies that he learnt. Business runs in his blood as I would always tell him. 

It was just a little extra effort that I took to kindle the interest of the child, which to my surprise, contributed for his wholesome development. 

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