Connecting what she studied to what she teachesConnecting what she studied to what she teaches

Two terms she found vague.

Artheeta Sarker describes the gap in one line: “You walk into school and somewhere you are not able to link.” During her Suraasa course she found she could connect the theory she had learnt earlier with what she was doing in school, and both with the theory she was now learning. “It all bridged together,” she says. “Whatever I learnt and whatever I was doing was making more sense to me.”

One example is vocabulary. Teaching strategies and teaching methods were, in her words, “very vague to me”. Now she treats them as “two distinct things. We cannot confuse the two.” She had been working in a school and writing lesson plans all along, and that part had still not been clear. “Now that I do my lesson plan, it is more technical.”

New apps, used sometimes.

She also learnt about building different activities into a lesson. “I never used to use those,” she says of the apps. “And I really do see the difference.” She is careful not to overstate it. It is not possible to apply everything, she says.

Searching for Dubai.

She came across Suraasa on Instagram. She had always been interested in trying for jobs abroad, “now that I know that this is my career path”, and in Dubai specifically, and she had been searching for teaching jobs there. She reached out for a mentor call, and was taken through “how it is going to be”. She has since finished all her assignments. She adds that she did get two jobs, and declined them “due to very personal reasons”.