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Jun 24, 2009

"That is the difference between good teachers and great teachers: good teachers make the best of a pupil's means; great teachers foresee a pupil's ends." --Maria Callas

30 Students Defying Expectation

Every April, some 230,000 Indians take the intensely competitive entrance exam to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) -- the seven prestigious schools that train India's top-notch engineers and entrepreneurs. Only 5,000 students get in. Most come from the middle-class and prepare for the test through private coaching. But in the past few years, a small group of desperately poor, talented students have made it into the IITs, thanks to the Ramanujan School of Mathematics located in Patna, the capital of Bihar. Anand Kumar,a local mathematician, and Abhayanand, the deputy director general of police and a lover of physics, founded the school in 2003 to help promising locals get ahead in the caste-based society. They scoured Bihar's least privileged communities for 30 bright students to coach, providing free lessons and housing. They call their group the Super 30. This year for the second time in succession, all 30 have made it through.