National Curriculum · Dhaka Board · SSC & HSC
Nineteen years teaching Mathematics, English and Chemistry to SSC and HSC students in one rented room in Tangail. Eight hundred taka a month for one subject. Twelve students in a batch, because thirteen cannot be taught properly.
Md. Shafiqul Islam · Private tutor — Maths, English & Chemistry
Inside the room
The board, the benches, the ledge, the marking and the wall. It turns over on its own every few seconds — rest a finger on it and it waits for you.
01 / 09
x² + 2x − 8 = 0 goes up, then it splits into (x + 4)(x − 2) = 0, then the two answers get ringed: x = −4, or x = 2. The quadratic formula is written underneath and it stays underneath. A student who can see that −8 is 4 × −2, and that +2 is 4 − 2, has the roots in his head before he has picked up a pen. The formula is for the day the numbers refuse to be kind — and that day comes in every board paper, so it is on the board too.
Board questions from 2015 to 2025 are worked on this board, in order, twice a year.
02 / 09
Four boxes drawn with a wooden scale — present, past, future, example — and then a single verb marched through all three. I am writing. He was writing. She will be writing. One verb, three times, underlined each time. Almost every mark a student loses in the writing part of the English paper is lost here, in the tense, not in the ideas. This table is copied into the front page of every exercise book on the first day, and asked for again in December.
Copied on day one, tested in December. Same table, same three sentences.
03 / 09
2CO + O₂ → 2CO₂, and the subscripts are in yellow chalk so the twos that decide the answer are the twos you can actually see. Down the left, the only atomic numbers a student really has to own by heart at the start: 1 H, 2 He, 6 C. The hexagon in the middle is benzene, and it gets drawn freehand at the top of every organic class until the hand does it without being asked, because a shaky ring costs marks in a diagram question.
White chalk for the equation, yellow for anything a student keeps getting wrong.
04 / 09
Green plaster, a shuttered window that does all the lighting until four o'clock, one fan and one bulb. Two rows of long wooden benches, six to a row. That is the entire business and it is the reason the fee is eight hundred taka. Twelve is the most this room will ever hold, and twelve is also the most one person can mark properly in a week — so the limit is not modesty, it is arithmetic. Nobody hides at the back, because there is no back.
Rented since 2011. First floor, above Hanif Store. Stairs are on the side of the building.
05 / 09
f(x) = x² − 4x + 3 goes up first, then y =, then the roots, one line under the next. No step is skipped and no line is rubbed out until the slowest hand in the room has it down. The chalk dust in the light is the honest part of this job — six hours a day standing at a board, sleeves pushed up, writing the same working out a second time for the boy who came late from the bus. That second time is free and it always will be.
If you missed a class, come twenty minutes early to the next one. The working goes up again.
06 / 09
Whatever is left of the week's chalk, a felt duster, a pair of brass compasses, and the handbell that closes a batch. The bell is rung twice and every student here knows the difference. The first ring, at ten minutes to the hour, means put your last line down and ask your question now. The second means stand up — the next twelve are already on the stairs, and a batch that runs long steals from the batch behind it.
Chalk is bought by the carton, forty sticks, and it lasts about nine days.
07 / 09
Books go in on Wednesday and come back on Saturday with a tick beside every line that is right — not one tick at the bottom of the page, which tells a student nothing. Where a line is wrong, the wrong step gets underlined and that is all. No correction is written in. Finding it is the student's work, and a correction copied out of my handwriting has never once stayed in anybody's head. This red pen and this wooden scale have been through roughly four thousand books.
A book that comes back unopened three weeks running gets a phone call home, not a lecture.
08 / 09
A circle, a triangle standing inside it on the diameter, and every arc the compasses walked still showing. Students always want to wipe the arcs off and hand in a clean figure. In the SSC geometry paper the construction marks carry marks of their own, and a tidy figure with the working rubbed away loses them every single time. The compasses and the set square hang on the frame where everyone can see them, because a figure drawn by eye is worth nothing at all.
Bring your own compasses. If you do not have a pair, take one from the ledge and put it back.
09 / 09
A student's father painted this grid on the wall long before I rented the room, and the paint is lifting away at the top corner. Under it is the shelf: a carton of chalk and the stack of graph books. It faces the benches for one reason. A student who cannot give 7 × 8 inside a second will lose time in every paper he ever sits — not marks for the tables themselves, but minutes, in the long questions, where the minutes decide the grade. So it stays exactly where a wandering eye lands.
Graph books are on the shelf. Take one when you need it; they are counted, not charged for.
What I teach
A teacher who offers six subjects is telling you he is good at none of them. These three are the ones I taught in school for nine years and the ones I still sit the board papers for myself, every January, before the students do.
Class 8 to HSC 2nd year
Algebra, trigonometry, geometry and probability. Every board question from 2015 to 2025 is worked on the board twice a year, in order, so nothing in the paper is the first time you have seen it.
Class 8 to SSC
Paper one and paper two. Tense, voice, narration and transformation drilled until they are automatic, then paragraph, letter, application and completing story — the parts of the paper where marks are actually won.
Class 9 to HSC 2nd year
Balancing, mole concept, acids and bases, and the organic basics. No practicals here — this room has no laboratory and I will not pretend otherwise. What you get is the written paper, taught properly.
Timetable
Six days a week, Saturday to Thursday. Friday the room is open in the afternoon and nobody pays for it.
| Batch | Who it is for | Days | Time | Size | Seats now |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Batch A | Class 9 — SSC 2027 | Sat · Mon · Wed | 6:30am — 8:00am | 12 seats | 2 free |
| Batch B | Class 10 — SSC 2026 | Sat · Mon · Wed | 4:00pm — 5:30pm | 12 seats | Full |
| Batch C | Class 10 — SSC 2026 | Sun · Tue · Thu | 5:40pm — 7:10pm | 12 seats | 1 free |
| Batch D | HSC 1st year | Sun · Tue · Thu | 7:20pm — 8:50pm | 10 seats | 3 free |
| Batch E | HSC 2nd year | Sat · Mon · Wed | 7:20pm — 8:50pm | 10 seats | Full |
| Friday | Anyone, any class | Friday | 4:00pm — 6:00pm | Open room | Free |
All three subjects = ৳1,900 ÷ 3 = about ৳633 for each subject, each month.
Results
These are the numbers from the last two boards, printed the way they came back. The one who did not pass is in the table too, because a page with only good news on it is not a result sheet.
| Exam | Sat the exam | Passed | Got GPA 5.00 |
|---|---|---|---|
| SSC 2025 — Dhaka Board | 41 | 40 | 17 |
| HSC 2025 — Dhaka Board | 22 | 21 | 6 |
| SSC 2024 — Dhaka Board | 38 | 38 | 13 |
One boy of the forty-one did not pass in 2025. He is sitting again this year, on the same bench, in the same batch, and he pays nothing until he passes.
How it runs
Phones stay in the bag. The hand remembers a line it has written; it does not remember a line it has photographed.
Homework is short enough that it genuinely gets done. Thirty sums come back copied from one boy; three come back attempted by twelve.
Books in on Wednesday, back on Saturday, a tick against every correct line and the wrong step underlined.
Marks are handed to each student folded over. Only the class average goes on the board — nobody is shamed in front of eleven others.
Three things, always the same three: days attended, last test mark, and whether the homework came in.
From the families
My son was getting forty in maths. I could not pay for the big coaching centre on the main road. Here it is eight hundred taka and Sir writes in the book exactly what my son got wrong. He got eighty-two in the June test.
Sir took no fee from my daughter for eleven months after her father died. He never told anybody. I found out from another parent, two years later.
Twelve in a room means he knows the day my boy has not done the homework. At the centre he was one of sixty and not one teacher knew his name.
Admission
Four steps, and the first one is free.
Any batch, no phone call first, no fee. Walk up the side stairs above Hanif Store and sit on the last bench. Listen to the whole class.
Or the last school test paper — whichever you have. Not to judge it. To see which chapter the trouble actually started in.
Ten maths, ten English, five chemistry. Nobody has ever been turned away for a low mark. It decides where we start, not whether you start.
If a bench is free you begin at the next batch day. If not, your name goes on the list taped to the door and you are called in order.
Where it is
First floor, above Hanif Store, Akur Takur Para, Tangail 1900
Side stairs, not the shop door. Green building, blue gate.
Calls after 9:30pm are not answered. An SMS is read the next morning without fail.