Akash Nandi wants to be a modifier of cars and bikes, a career that does not find encouragement at home. Gaurav Nowlakha wants to pursue management studies abroad, immediately after Plus II, but didn?t know where to go. Debanik De wants to take up computer animation as a profession but wasn?t sure if a mainstream educational institute had a course.

It was a bunch of confused minds at The Heritage School that faced career counsellor Amrita Dass (picture left by Sudeshna Banerjee) who had flown down from the Institute of Career Studies in Lucknow.

?Our endeavour is to prepare children not just for the Board exams but also for what happens later. There is a lot of unawareness among parents regarding newly emerging fields like sports medicine and biotechnology. That is why very often children are forced to tread the beaten track,? explained principal Neelkanth Gupta. And that is why the day included a full session with the parents, who came with their own set of doubts.

Teachers also interacted with Dass, who shared with them the findings of a survey among students from across the country of the qualities they seek in a teacher.

?Approachable, encouraging, impartial, command of the subject and the ability to teach it well,? she spelt out one after another, pointing out how attitudinal qualities mattered more to young minds than professional ones.

?Years ago the Kothari Commission had stated that the future of India was being shaped in her classrooms. Sadly, that is happening in few places,? she said, while lauding the school for adopting the interactive technique over the chalk-and-talk method in class.

The problem of dealing with recalcitrant students without meting out punishment also came up from the floor. Dass stressed on motivation as a factor to turn around such students. ?When nothing works, it is best to speak to them outside class. Once I came across a boy who was completely lost in class. On speaking to him, I realised his father came home drunk every night and beat up his mother. So the root of academic failure can lie elsewhere.?

Mental alertness was another area that teachers were advised to nurture, by slipping in simple problems of logical deduction in class.

The students themselves enthusiastically solved such problems during their session. ?I got a prize for guessing the correct number of squares in a diagram,? said Arundhati Gupta of Class X, who had come to find out how to serve the army as a doctor.

The best part of the seminar was that it was only the beginning of a process. ?The students now become members of our institute and can interact with us directly over e-mail. There are more than 200 career options now. An aptitude test will also take place and we will help them find the ideal career,? Dass said.

Sudeshna Banerjee