Satyam Mishra

Satyam Mishra is a maths teacher from Bhagalpur, Bihar, India, determined to change the way children look at the world through his pedagogy. He first got the teaching bug at age seven when he taught his 72-year-old grandmother to read and he never forgot the experience of having the power to free people from illiteracy.  

After graduating as an engineer he chose to become a teacher and his methods saw all records broken across all 320 Teach for India classrooms when 100% of his students made it through to college, with even NASA commenting on the work. His work over the last seven years has included teaching some of the world’s most vulnerable children for the Teach For All network in India, South Africa, Nepal, Lebanon, Austria, Bulgaria and Nigeria, including refugee students from over 17 countries.  

Girls education is a cause close to his heart and he was the first Indian to be invited to teach at the Malala Yousafzai All Girls’ School, a school Malala herself started for Syrian refugee girls in Beqaa, Lebanon, with even a UN Under-Secretary General commenting on Satyam’s “noble task.” He was recognised as a ‘Network Connector’ and selected to be a 'Global Girls' Education Fellow' at Teach for All for his work on girls’ education. 

Sharing cool multiplication tricks and showing how trigonometry could be a tool to calculate the height of Mount Everest, numbers were no longer scary for his students; connecting subjects with greater depth made math all the more 'real' and logic-based for them. Initiatives like his 'Mathematics of Peace' helped students understand the adverse effects of war and the UN Sustainable Development Goals, illustrated by getting them to calculate how the energy released by a single atomic explosion could take care of Afghanistan’s energy needs for a decade, helping them vividly understand the importance of development over destruction. 

His determination for young people being able to get on in life is demonstrated by him having sold newspapers and taken care of shops in some parts of the world to fund his poorest students’ study. Innovation and smart use of technology explain Satyam’s phenomenal teaching success and popularity with global audiences via the TedX Global Shapers community. He has used applications to create videos explaining complex concepts so students could learn at their pace and even at home for free, helped his students become global citizens by introducing them to changemakers in other countries to deepen cultural ties and swopped copies of his students work with those from overseas students when he has travelled for conferences and events, so their minds are continually broadened.  

He is the first from his state to be a Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert, a certified Apple Teacher, and a National Geographic Certified Educator for introducing technology to under-resourced schools and student-led research on climate change and awareness. For his work with special needs students, he was selected as one of 16 teachers worldwide as an ‘Inclusive Education Fellow’ by Oak Foundation and Teach for All.