More facilities: Sri Ramakrishna Mission Higher Secondary School (Main) on Bashyam Road, T. Nagar, has introduced
digital boards and opened computer laboratories.
| Photo Credit: M. VEDHAN

The teachers at the Ramakrishna Mission Higher Secondary School (Main) call themselves members of the RKM family. The school, which admits students from Class VI, is run by the Ramakrishna Mission. It also offers moral instruction. “The Swamijis are very kind. We are the RKM family. A teacher recently had a baby. We get only three months of paid leave. Since the teacher had no one to take care of her child, the school created a childcare facility: a room where the mother could nurse her baby. The management allowed the grandmother to attend to the baby while the teacher conducted classes,” says principal M. Chitra.

The school focuses on teaching students the cultural heritage of India, says Gopalakrishnan, a former Director-General of Police, who was honoured with the distinguished alumnus award in 2011. In 2001, the school’s alumni association started honouring its distinguished alumni and retiring teachers as an effort to sustain the institution and pay back to their alma mater.

Icons among alumni

Among its alumni are Chennai’s icons who have made a name for themselves in various fields: Sankara Nethralaya founder S.S. Badrinath, tennis player R. Krishnan, actor R.S. Manohar, industrialist Nalli Kuppuswami Chetti, former Union Minister E.V.K.S. Elangovan, bureaucrats B.S. Raghavan, P. Shankar, and M.R. Srinivasan, former Reserve Bank of India Governor Y. Venugopal Reddy, and filmmaker Pa. Vasanth.

The school has introduced digital boards and invested on improving classroom experience for students with computer laboratories. All the efforts at improving facilities have paid off, says Ms. Chitra.

The alumni association’s souvenir released during the alumni day on September 18, 2016, gives a glimpse of the school’s influence on its students. It calls for more batches to organise their silver and golden jubilee reunions “to create a better bondage between them and the school”.

Apathy towards writing

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the learning process, says Ms. Chitra. There is a marked apathy among students towards writing, she says. “We have to make the students write several times.”

Playing games on the mobile phone has become an obsession. “They have become addicts. We have resorted to checking students for mobile phones when they enter the school. We call the parents when we notice that the students’ schoolwork is affected, especially during the examinations. Often, the parents give us the authority to confiscate the phones and not to return them until the school year ends,” she adds.

She was recently invited to participate in a marriage in her home town. “The father and the son were both my students,” says the teacher, who will be retiring in a few months.