The Avinya Scoop

  The Path to Building Trust Let me start this week’s blog with a story.  It’s been sometime since I’ve been in the classroom, but I distinctly remember the students I have taught and have accumulated my own treasure trove of memories. I think these hold a special place in every teacher’s heart.  Let me tell you briefly about one of these stories. I was teaching a group of young learners. Their ages ranged from 9 to 12 years old. It was a class I’d had for over a term and I knew most of the kids. I walked into the classroom on the first day and greeted everyone and then I noticed one of the kids under the table.  She was new.  The other kids were all looking bewildered.  In my head, I told myself (yes teachers talk to themselves all the time!) to not highlight this, so we got onto our first task. While the other kids were busy with that, I crouched down and invited the new kid to join one of the groups. It took awhile but I managed to convince her eventuall...

“If you're opening a hot dog stand, you could worry about the condiments, the cart, the name, the decoration. But the first thing you should worry about is the hot dog. The hot dogs are the epicenter. Everything else is secondary.”   Jason Fried What am I on about you may wonder? Since when does Avinya focus on hotdogs?  Do not be alarmed, we haven’t shifted focus to be the best fast food chain in Sri Lanka :) Our hotdogs are  our students  and they are definitely the epicenter of everything. That's been a theme this week. It is important to constantly remind ourselves of this. In anything we do, what is our epicenter and why are we doing what we are doing? If it does not make sense to our epicenter, then we shouldn’t really be doing it! It’s that simple. Other than me thinking about hotdogs :) we rode into this week  on the crest of a wave - a wave full of press releases, admissions and social media hype! We were so excited that we were finally able to share wi...

You know how last week I implied that this week would be a pretty special one for Team Avinya? Well, it’s been that and more! We ran the last stretch of testing our Admissions system and are now extremely happy to report that admissions are now open for our very first Avinya Academy in… Bandaragama . For more details on this incredible feat which is in partnership with the Sarvodaya Institute of Higher Learning please see the announcement blog post.   As you know it’s been an incredible journey to get here. Lots of ups and downs, caves, tunnels and then light! We had our own internal deadlines and wanted this out earlier but we didn’t want something out there that we weren’t completely happy with. So to make sure we could have a system that is exactly what we need, we realized we needed to take our time with it. The good news is the time has come! “ The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of meeting the schedule has been forgotten .” Karl Wiegers Quality is ...

This week, I have been tasked with the tall order of following on from the fantastic blog from our amazing educator team... I shall try to keep up!   It’s been another wonderful week of incredible work. If you looked through the windows you would’ve seen so much of activity that it would have made your head spin. I went home on Tuesday and thought it was Friday, you get my drift :)  I think we have learnt how to elongate hours of the day now as our ambitious deadlines loom. I’m pretty sure Samisa has a secret weapon or has an AI bot that does this for him. Or an AI bot that allows him to sleep and work at the same time. I’m not sure which one… :) If I could sum up this week in one quote it would be this: “I’ve learned over decades of building that a deadline is a potent tool for problem-solving. ” (Adam Savage) That’s what happens doesn’t it? Deadlines loom, problems come out of the woodwork and then you put the amazing heads of your brilliant team together and voilà! A whole ...