PROFILE

Teacher October

Urmila Chowdhury is a teacher, a teacher-trainer, an illustrator, a cartoonist, a theatre enthusiast and a counsellor. She is also Vice Principal of The Shri Ram School, New Delhi.

Ms Chowdhury did her Honours and Masters from Jadavpur University, and BEd from Calcutta University. She taught in the city’s New Vista School and La Martiniere for Girls before moving to Delhi where she joined the prestigious Shri Ram School in 1994.

She has served The Shri Ram School in various capacities — as Head of the English department, as Deputy Head of the Junior School, as Academic Coordinator and finally as Vice Principal. Colleagues say that her various responsibilities never interfered with her ‘core’ duty as a teacher which bears a distinct stamp of her humane personality. She has “no personal agenda,” they say, and that “her loyalty lies with her students”. She has a way with ‘difficult children’ with whom she deals by simply talking to them at their level, tolerating their little quirks and channeling their wayward energy into constructive pursuits.

It is not merely the students that Ms Chowdhury is good with. She did the ‘Intel Teach to the Future’ master trainer’s course after which she has been regularly training and organising workshops for teachers. She was even sent to Australia under the teacher-exchange programme.

Ms Chowdhury learned to use drama in the classroom from a professional group based in the UK. She uses her skills at illustrating as an effective classroom teaching tool and even got her cartoons published by a reputed publishing house.

While in college Ms Choudhary worked as a volunteer in various organisations working work with differently-abled children. Even today she tries to help her mother who runs a school for underprivileged children on the outskirts of Kolkata, whenever she can. She is in the process of developing a simple, user-friendly, cost-effective methodology of teaching English language skills to children of the poorer sections of society as she believes that “it is the one thing that separates the ‘haves’ from the ‘have nots’ —both psychologically and in reality”.