The strong presence of the city residents on the social media came to the aid of over 100 visually challenged candidates taking up model examinations for the Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) exam on Saturday and Monday.
Many persons, including students, graduates, working professionals and senior citizens, came together as scribes for the candidates and helped them write the model exams after seeing a post on Facebook for the same.
The candidates had joined the training programme conducted by the Government Education Department and the State Council for Teacher Education at Sethupathi Higher Secondary School.
“While the government will provide scribes for us during our final examination, we were asked to find people who would help us attend the model papers,” said K. Anandhi, a visually-challenged candidate.
“We were very keen on attempting the model papers since most of us hadn’t gone through such training and preparation during our previous TET attempts,” she said, and added that she had contacted a few city-based activists a day before the examination.
They had subsequently posted the message on a few popular Facebook pages dedicated to the city.
“Within an hour of posting the message, we got over 40 calls from volunteers. On the day of the exam, we had nearly 100 of them who had seen the online messages and registered to be scribes,” said Selvam Ramaswamy, a resident who was involved in spreading the message on Facebook.
Talking about the experience, K. Ragamadthullah, an MBA student, who had volunteered to be a scribe said he was glad to be of help to the aspiring teachers.
“The scribes included doctors, government servants and young students who gave up their holidays on Saturday and Monday to help us attempt the examinations,” said K. Venkatesh Kumar, another visually-challenged candidate.
“They were extremely friendly and gave us confidence that we could tackle the final exam,” he added.
