Kaivallya Dasu
This one is a breezy, humorous take on how teachers too are human, hate coming to school on Saturdays, and having come, decide to play ball among themselves. Don’t miss reading this story as it easily found favour with everyone to take the second prize.

Usha Prabhakar
It is the sea which has an important role to play in the lives of the main protagonists — the school headmistress Shanta, the young boy, Appu and a teacher, Malini. How the three play out their lives as they survive a storm forms the crux of the story. This one had a unanimous vote to bag the third place.

Ananya Pathak
What if a young girl did not like her name? Why did she find her name so hard to accept? After all, she was a school girl studying in class 7. Is there a story behind this? Here is a moving tale about Drishti and how she came to accept life on her terms.

Deepti Dilip Kumar
A very enthusiastic teacher with plans of honing the students’ thinking skills, a litter of kittens found somewhere in the school and a group of curious children. When all these come together, there are bound to be some life lessons that need to be learnt. Did that happen?

P Ajitha
Workplace politics , one would think, is restricted to the corporate corridor. But , in schools too, staffroom politics can be equally challenging and stressful. This story gives you a glimpse into one such incident and how the protagonist managed to deal with it.

Bridget Chandramohan
When children put their learning into action, then it’s time for some appreciation. Here’s a story of how two children get together and strive to save trees from being felled in the place where they live.

Sujata Unnikrishnan
Stories always influence people to act and children are no exception. In this short tale, when children begin to litter their classroom unmindful of the mess they are creating, a teacher takes it upon herself to tell them a story about how planets began to fight among themselves and in the process ruined the earth. Did the children take the cue? How did they respond?

Pooja Keshavan Singh A teacher’s life is full of stories, in fact every day that she spends with her learners, the narrative grows. My life is no different. The story that I am about to pen has been picked out of many turn-a-rounds that I have witnessed in my students’ lives over the years. The reason I picked this one is because this child and her mother struggled for years to beat an insensitive system and used its loopholes to their benefit. I played a small, yet significant role in helping them and their story needs to be told for the sake of many who suffer for no fault of theirs. I spotted Myra for the first time in a park near my house and I knew she was not a ‘normal’ child. She was very frail and short, she wore thick glasses, she barely had friends, but was and is an ever-smiling person. I had just started a career as a teacher and Myra’s mother approached me to help her daughter with class X mathematics. I knew it would be a challenge to teach Myra. I agreed because I like to take up difficult cases but at that time I had no idea how difficult it would turn out to be. Interacting with Myra, I realized she had very little understanding of the mathematics she was supposed to do in class X. I started with tracing lines for linear equations in two variables. I saw that she could only do them mechanically. She did not know what equations or variables were so forming and solving equations in word problems was not possible for her. Similarly she could learn theorems in two-dimensional geometry but could not apply them to solve problems. In the unit on Mensuration, Myra could learn the formulas and apply them in simple, straightforward problems but could not understand complex sums. Understanding probability and trigonometry were out of the question. Performing basic calculations in Data Handling was the easiest unit for her. The mathematical profile that I have constructed for Myra was based on a whole year of observations but there were many other things I got to know about her during this time. Myra, the only child of her parents, had been very ill all her childhood as she was born premature. Doctors had given very little chance of her survival because of her under developed lungs. She had a very narrow food pipe and a tiny stomach. Her bone structure