For most of our readers, the magazine must be this package that just drops into the mailbox once a month, is flipped through and passed around, and maybe discussed occasionally among friends and colleagues. At the other end, we, the group at Teacher Plus, conceptualize our readers in different ways. You are people sitting around a staff room table sipping tea and discussing your personal and professional lives. You are principals and heads of schools bent over your office desks or holding parental meetings. You are individuals dealing with the minds and hearts of children – or young adults – and wondering about the never-ending challenge of making learning interesting and meaningful. You are people walking home at the end of the day, wiping tired brows and massaging shoulders heavy with tests to mark and projects to review.
While some of you write and extend this acquaintance, the majority of our readers are strangers. We can only hope we are making a connection with you each month, but we have no way of really knowing how real that connection is and whether it is being made at all.
Last month when I sat helping insert the new issue of the magazine into mailing envelopes, I decided to amuse myself by reading the names on the labels. It was an exercise that I found both rewarding and humbling. There were men and women from the bylanes of Bangalore and Mumbai, from village pathashalas in Rajasthan and Bihar, principals and librarians from alternative, mainstream and all other hues of schools, sisters from convents in the northeast and correspondents from colleges of education. So Teacher Plus was actually reaching corners of the country that most of us in this little office in Hyderabad had never been to, or had no first-hand (or even third-hand) knowledge of! It’s rewarding to know that we reach so far. But it’s humbling to realize that we know so little about the people we reach, and about the kinds of classrooms they work in, the challenges they face, day to day.
So if your name is on one of those labels on a brown envelope with the Teacher Plus logo, consider this a personal appeal – write to us, let us know who you are, and what you’re thinking as you read this magazine!