Sharing the Magic of Learning

When he was eight years old Satyam Mishra, Ed.M.'25, thought he was a magician.

Mishra, a graduate of HGSE’s Teaching and Teacher Leadership (TTL) Program, speaks with passion about magic and myths and legend. Growing up in Bihar, India, he didn’t have a television or the internet and his grandmother became the “storyteller” of the family. By age 7, though, Mishra noticed those stories were always told out loud, from memory, and his grandmother would often ask him to read the paper for her or check wedding invitations so she could remember the date and time written on them. His grandmother, he realized, didn’t know how to read. And that’s where Mishra conjured his first taste of teaching magic.

“We started working together because we were very close,” says Mishra. “And she became literate in eight months.”

Mishra, a storyteller in his own right, remembers all the details of those months with his grandmother. It was the summer of 1998, a summer so sweltering in Bihar that a pet bird the family kept actually died from the heat. And while he was doing his own homework, he taught his 72-year-old grandmother the reading lessons he had learned in school.

“I remember I was writing my quarterly exam in grade three, and my grandmother was writing her very first alphabet,” says Mishra. “She is 99 today. And she still doesn’t need anyone’s help in reading.”

Mishra says he learned something important at a young age: In order to teach someone something, you have to do more than just know the facts yourself. You also have to be able to explain what you know to others in a way that they can understand. It is a lesson he’s carried through his career in education.

“I genuinely thought I had some special power to kind of help people get educated,” says Mishra. “I mean, she couldn’t read. I work with her, now she can read! You know, I’m such a great magician! That made me love teaching. That made me fall in love with teaching for life.”

He’s seen similar works of magic throughout his teaching career. While he was teaching through Teach For India, Mishra recalls, students would clap and cheer as he came into the classroom every day to teach math. A maintenance worker noticed Misha’s students getting excited about math class and began to talk with him about his teaching, revealing that she had dropped out of school in grade 10 in part because she struggled in math.

“She saw that, ‘OK, math can be taught in a fun way. Maybe I’m getting the wrong impression,’” says Mishra. “She saw that as she was sweeping the floors. She saw students having fun.”

Just like with his grandmother years earlier, Mishra started working with her after class.

“She cleared her grade 10 exam in her first go,” says Mishra, noting that it had been 16 years since she had last had a lesson. “She cleared her grade 12 exam two years later. And now she wants to be a teacher herself, to work with adult women who want a second chance in life.”

At HGSE Convocation, Mishra was presented with the Phyllis Strimling Award, given annually to an HGSE student who — among other requirements — works to advance society by advancing women, demonstrates inclusive leadership, and is inspirational to others. 

One of the award’s aims is to honor a candidate who “demonstrates ability in problem-solving to pull together and appreciate multiple perspectives and integrates those perspectives in making sound decisions.”

“I think if adult women in India have missed the bus, they should have all the chance in the world to get on that bus and go wherever they want in life,” says Mishra. “I get motivated by these stories, which are just human values and the strengths that human values can have. I was a stranger to [the maintenance worker]. She believed in me, and I believed in her; something that I taught her helped, and something she taught me made a difference in my life.

“Those are the little connections that I think people miss,” Mishra continues. “Please treasure that. Don’t miss out on these little things that happen.”

Mishra’s educational impact as a teacher has been felt in 18 countries thus far, from working in Malala Yousafzai’s all-girls school in Lebanon to the Nepal highlands and tribal villages across India. In 2021, he was a finalist for the Varkey Foundation and UNSECO’s Global Teacher Prize. Before applying to HGSE, he was a Fulbright Scholar at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Mishra says learning he was admitted at the Ed School was “the best day of my life,” and describes his time in Cambridge in nearly otherworldly terms.

“Harvard is this mythical place for people applying from outside it. Growing up in Bihar, which is in the Hindi speaking belt, there was not much of a difference between Harvard and Hogwarts,” says Mishra. “For me, it was this almost magical place, where the top people in the world go.”

Once on Appian Way, Mishra made immediate connections and learned how deep and supportive the Ed School’s community can be. Mishra lauded the “global village” he found in classrooms and elsewhere on campus. His year at Harvard, for example, has done wonders, he says, for two of his favorite hobbies: collecting currency and stamps from countries all around the globe. He’s at 76 different currencies and counting, and said most of them were added to his collection by asking people on campus about their life and work over a cup of coffee.

“I get the currency and then I also get to know what’s happening in the world,” Mishra explains. “It’s a community-building process for me. I love that.”

Reflecting on his time at HGSE, Mishra says he’s realized his own educational goals are often not big enough, despite teaching in so many different places.

“Harvard made me ask the right questions,” Mishra says. “I came in here with a very different vision. I came in with a vision for personal improvement, to become a better teacher.”

His goal is now to build communities of teacher trainers, expanding his reach by showing other educators how their work makes an impact in communities that need it most. Later this summer, Mishra will serve as director of the Teacher-Training Institute in Uzbekistan. Starting in Kashadarya, a remote region in the southwestern part of the country, Mishra is excited to share a lesson he’s learned from his time at Harvard with anyone who will listen: Sometimes, you have to just go for it.

“A lot of intelligent people, they tend to self-reject,” says Mishra. “Please don’t do that. I would have never made it to Harvard if I self-rejected.”

Mishra wonders if he’s the only teacher from Bihar — a region in India home to more than 130 million people — to ever come to Harvard and earn his master’s in education. Either way, he’s determined to make sure he’s not the last.

“There are many, many people who are doing such incredible work in my part of the world,” says Mishra. “People who can come here, learn at Harvard, and genuinely contribute to our mission to learn to change the world.”