As a young child, we all have dreams and we plan our lives around those dreams but as we grow older and reality kicks in, we are forced to accept that our dreams are sometimes too farfetched. That was the same dilemma Rajkumarie Lall found herself in when she was ready to enter into the world of work a few decades ago.
The 48-year-old teacher has been attached to the Anna Regina Multilateral Secondary School for over two and a half decades but has been teaching for over 30 years. For someone who has been in a profession for so long, one would think that they always dreamed of doing just that but that was not the case of Miss Radha, as she is popularly known.
Miss Radha has always dreamt of becoming a lawyer to lift herself and family out of poverty. She explains that while growing up on the Island of Wakenaam in the Essequibo River her family was extremely poor but saw education as a way of breaking the cycle of poverty.
“My father always encouraged us to do good in school and focus on our education since he saw that as the way of getting us out of poverty. So we did just that and because of our situation I could not follow my dreams of becoming a lawyer and I had to take the first job that was offered to me and that was teaching,” she said.
After being a part of the profession for so long, Miss Radha has come to love it and cannot see herself doing anything else. She says that the level of excitement she experiences when her students excel and not only exams but at life, in general, is far too great to measure.
She would have received her secondary education in part at the Essequibo Island Secondary School and completed at the North Georgetown Secondary and subsequently joined the staff at the North Georgetown in October of 1987.
She attended the Cyril Potter College of Education from 1988 to 1991 and graduated as a trained teacher in the Pre-Vocational Studies programme. In 1991 she was transferred to her alma mater, Essequibo Island Secondary on her home Island where she taught for three years. She would later get married and moved to the Essequibo Coast which caused her to be transferred ARMS in 1994 where she remains a teacher to date.
“However, for 4 of those years, I was seconded to Queen’s College in order to attend the University of Guyana in 2012. My experience at the University of Guyana was very rewarding and because of my age and experience I graduated in 2016 as the Best Graduating Student in the Faculty of Education and Humanities.”
During that time she also received several awards with two being the closest to her hear. She received the Vice-Chancellor Special Awards and the Guyana Teachers Union Award.
During her years of teaching, she has seen her students and the sector evolve beyond expectations. She notes that every student comes to school with different abilities and to tap into that is the teacher’s responsibility. The teacher is there to nurture and provide the right kind of guidance to that student so that they can become the best version of themselves which ultimately aids the progression of development.
However, Miss Radha is not all about sugarcoating things for her students rather she likes to give them doses of reality in order to better prepare them for the world ahead. She is not focused on producing students who are only good on paper but also students who can function in the capacities they ought to.
“My love and empathy towards my students, especially the underprivileged, is my strong point. Their issues are my issues and their successes are my successes. I create a special bond with my students so that they trust me to confide in me so we can get over obstacles together and become the individuals we were destined to become,” she says.
Her philosophy is finding the joy in the simplest things in life since life does not have to be perfect to be wonderful. (Times Sunday Magazine)
