60% of state’s school teachers not college-pass!

Hemali Chhapia | TNN

Mumbai: The number of graduates in the state is rising, but most of our children continue to be taught by Class X and high school dropouts. Fresh government data reveals that almost 60% teachers in government and aided schools have never gone to college.

The severity of the problem can be gauged from the fact that the majority of schools in the state are public institutes.

Worse, teachers with higher academic qualification are stepping out of schools to pick an alternative profession. Between 2005-’06 and 2007-’08, the state largely recruited teachers who had just cleared Class X or high school (class XII). Till four years ago, minimum academic qualification for an aided/government school teacher was Class X with a diploma in education (DEd). In 2004, the state upped the minimum qualification bar to Class XII plus DEd.

Shockingly, the number of graduates taking up teaching has far from improved, and as educationist J M Abhayankar pointed out, “Besides, the state too has not made any attempts to better the academic levels of their teachers’’. Picture this: a teacher who starts in the basic monthly salary scale of Rs 4,500 to Rs 7,000, is entitled to a senior scale salary of Rs 5,000 to Rs 8,000 after nine years. “However, there is no additional qualification required to avail of the senior scale remuneration,’’ he added.

Some time in the late 1960’s, then education minister Madhukar Chaudhari had presented a paper on how many school teachers were merely class seven-pass.

‘Teaching is not an attractive profession’

Mumbai: In the last four decades, the state has done precious little to improve the academic qualification of its teachers. Educationist J M Abhayankar noted that the state earlier used to provide an incentive to teachers who would complete graduation with a first class, but that scheme was stopped.

What’s worse, Maharashtra is not the only state that paints such a grim picture. The Delhi-based National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA), which mapped the 2004-06 data of teachers’ academic achievements in its report, noted, “Irrespective of the type of school, the qualification of a good number of teachers is below secondary level.’’

While over 56% of state teachers are either merely school or high school qualified, Mumbai has 46% of its teachers who have never received collegiate education. Similarly, 52.39% teachers in Pune and 57.09% in Nagpur are either class X or class XII qualified. NIEPA senior research fellow N Govinda opined, “Most state governments insist on recruiting D.Ed. students and not so much graduates or B.Ed (Bachelors in Education). Besides, there is no growth for primary level teachers. It’s a dead end.’’ At most, a primary teacher can become the head of the primary school, so a lot of them drop out of the profession if they have high academic qualifications.

But a secondary level teacher can scale up to occupy the position of a Block level officer or a district officer.

In a span of a year, data reveals that Maharashtra largely recruited class XII pass-outs for its schools. But state level educationist Heramb Kulkarni said that schools must be equipped with not just graduate teachers, but faculty who have specialised in a particular area of knowledge must be appointed to teach that subject. “A student asked his geography teacher, if the moon affects the ocean tides, why doesn’t it not affect the water stored in the well of my house. But the teacher had no answer.’’

hemali.chhapia@timesgroup.com

Jaipur couple part of Big Bang-II

Akhilesh Kumar Singh | TNN

Jaipur: When, at 12.30 pm on Wednesday, a group of physicists turn on a machine that will recreate the birth of the universe, the Raniwala couple from Jaipur will be watching the experiment very closely.

Sudhir and Rashmi Raniwala, associate professors of physics at Rajasthan University (RU), are among the 30-odd physicists from India, who are part of what can be called the largest experiment in human history. At the heart of this is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which was constructed at a cost of £4.4 billion. It is the latest in a series of successively more powerful particle accelerators that have been built at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) laboratory in Geneva.

Within the LHC’s circular tunnel, 27 km in circumference, beams of protons will be accelerated to up to 99.999999% of the speed of light. When they smash together, they will generate concentrations of energy resembling those that occurred during the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. “We have designed the Photon Multiplicity Detector (PMD), which has been fitted in the LHC, in which small particles (protons) will be accelerated and made to collide at the highest-ever man-made speed,” Sudhir said. The PMD was developed at the Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre in Kolkata.

To give you an idea, everything that you see around you, including yourself, can be reduced to atoms, which can further be broken up into neutrons, protons and electrons. Neutrons and protons together form the nucleus of an atom. But what makes up neutrons and protons? That’s where quarks come into the picture. These are subatomic particles held together by gluons and form the nucleus of an atom. In nature, quarks are always found bound together in groups, and never in isolation, because of a phenomenon known as confinement. These groups of quarks are called hadrons. When beams of protons smash together at almost the speed of light there will be such a high concentration of energy that a form of matter called quarkgluon plasma will be created. In this phase, for a brief period of time, a large number of free quarks and gluons can exist. That was how things were just after the Big Bang.

Orissa panics on ‘penultimate’ day
Bhubaneswar: With some channels flashing news that the world will come to an end on Wednesday because of a scientific experiment triggered panic among people in Bhubaneswar. While some visited temples, others bunked work to spend the “penultimate” day with near and dear ones. The capital city also witnessed a mad rush in non-vegetarian restaurants and sweet shops. TNN

BIG BANG ON EARTH TODAY Physicists To Recreate Cosmic Phenomenon In Hope Of Finding How Universe Began
Geneva: Scientists at a vast underground Swiss laboratory will launch an experiment on Wednesday to re-enact the “Big Bang” on a small scale to explain the origins of the universe and how it came to harbour life.

The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, will use giant magnets housed in cathedral-size caverns to fire beams of energy particles around a 27-km tunnel where they will smash together near the speed of light. Computers will analyze particles given off for clues to what happened at the Big Bang.

Scientists at the CERN laboratory, near the foothills of the Jura mountains, will pursue long elusive concepts such as “dark matter”, “dark energy”, extra dimensions and, most of all, the “Higgs Boson” believed to have made it all possible.

“The LHC was conceived to radically change our vision of the universe,” said CERN’s French directorgeneral Robert Aymar. “Whatever discoveries it brings, mankind’s understanding of our world’s origins will be greatly enriched.”

CERN scientists have been at pains to deny suggestions by some critics that the experiment could create tiny black holes of intense gravity that could suck in the whole planet.

The experiment is projected to restage trillions of times the moment some 15 billion years ago when, as cosmologists believe, an unimaginably dense and hot object the size of a small coin exploded, expanding rapidly to create stars, planets and eventually life on Earth.

The 10 billion Swiss franc ($9 billion) effort at CERN, the 20-nation European Organization for Nuclear Research on the edge of Geneva, begins with a relatively simple procedure: The first beams of protons will be fired around the 17-mile tunnel to test the controlling strength of the world’s largest superconducting magnets.

It will still be about a month before beams travelling in opposite directions are brought together in collisions that some sceptics fear could create micro “black holes” and endanger the planet.

The experiment is not without its detractors. Websites on the internet, itself created at CERN in the early 1990s as a means of passing particle research results to scientists around the globe, have been inundated with claims that the LHC will create black holes sucking in the planet.

“Nonsense,” say the most trenchant of CERN scientists, who, with colleagues in the US and Russia issued a detailed report last weekend arguing that such a disaster was out of the question.

“The LHC is safe, and any suggestion that it might present a risk is pure fiction,” said Aymar in a comment on the report. British physicist Brian Cox said the “end of the world” ideas were “nonsense…. spread by conspiracy theorists.” REUTERS

THE EXPERIMENT The Large Hadron Collider will smash together energy particles near the speed of light to get clues to what happened at the Big Bang

THE CONTROVERSY Scientists say there’s a chance that the LHC could create microscopic black holes. They hasten to add that the tiny singularities will instantly pop out of existence

GOD’S PARTICLE The LHC should confirm whether Higgs Boson, a theoretical particle which is thought to give matter its mass and is also known as the “God particle”, exists

Rajasthan University profs Sudhir and Rashmi Raniwala, along with 30 Indian physicists, have designed equipment for Wednesday’s experiment to recreate the birth of the universe

Govt mulls Bharatpedia for students & teachers...

New Delhi: The HRD ministry is planning to launch Bharatpedia, a collaborative online encyclopaedia like Wikipedia. Primarily for students and teachers, Bharatpedia will be part of the National Mission in Education through ICT in the 11th Plan. Sources said the name Bharatpedia was coined by HRD officials to evoke instant association.

A senior official said, “Work on Bharatpedia is going on. It will have content for college students as well as others. It can be edited, updated and corrected just like Wikipedia entries. But it is aimed mainly at the teaching community.” It will also have e-books in English for most subjects. “Launching an encyclopaedia is the next step after we started online portal Sakshat,” the official added.

The National Mission in Education, a collaborative effort of the HRD ministry, department of IT and department of telecommunications, aims to establish EduSat teaching hubs in each of the 200 central universities besides having 2,000 broadband internet nodes in each of them. There will also be one satellite interactive terminal to provide network connectivity in 18,000 colleges. The mission also involves digitization of video content of teaching and learning material generated over time. TNN

BIAS ALLEGED

Indian boards ‘downmarket’, IB students reap the benefit

Anahita Mukherji I TNN

Mumbai: There’s a clear bias in schools where international boards operate out of the same building as ICSE or SSC schools. In some cases, school managements give preferential treatment to children from the international boards. Kids from these boards are also conscious of the fact that they are coughing up three times the fee that their counterparts in “downmarket’’ Indian boards pay.

For instance, SSC students at Podar International School, Santa Cruz, have suddenly been told that they cannot be issued books from the school library—they can only read books while sitting in the library. On the other hand, children from the IB school that runs in the same building are allowed to take home library books. This has caused an uproar among parents. The management, however, has completely denied this and said that all children are equally important to them.

However, while the management says that it “believes in the SSC curriculum’’, the parents aren’t convinced. Especially since they received circulars during the admission season earlier this year, giving them the option of joining the ICSE and CBSE schools run by the same management. Incidentally, TOI has information that ICSE and CBSE students were not given similar circulars during admission time, giving them the option of joining the SSC school.

At another upmarket suburban school, Jamnabai Narsee at Vile Parle, where classes for the IB section are conducted on the sixth floor, IB students are allowed to use the lift, along with the staff. The rest of the children simply walk up the stairs, even those with classes on the fifth floor.

“Kids from international boards are acutely aware that they are coughing up a fee of Rs 1 lakh compared to their counterparts from the ICSE section who only pay Rs 35,000,’’ say parents of those studying in Jamnabai. In fact, they often mock ICSE kids for being “nerds’’ who’re studying hard for a high Std X score that’ll help them get into an Indian college whereas the kids in the international board feel that an IGCSE-cum-IB qualification is a ticket to the Big Apple.

Principal Josephine Vaz, however, says she hasn’t come across any instances of snobbishness in the school.

IITs to lower bar for SC/STs even further

Hemali Chhapia | TNN

Mumbai: Directors of the premier Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) have decided to lower entry levels for Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) students even further to cope with the issue of reserved seats falling vacant. On Sunday, the seven heads who met in Kharagpur unanimously agreed to allow a 50% relaxation of scores for SC/ST students, up from the current 40%, for the upcoming Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) in April 2009.

With regard to the JEE-2008 scores, if the last general category student was admitted with an overall score of 172 out of 489, the aggregate cut-off for an SC/ST student was 104 (after a 40% relaxation). If the general category cut-off in 2009 is the same, the bar for SC/ST candidates would be lowered to 86 (50% of 172). Similarly, subject-wise cut-offs would also be relaxed.

This means that with the last general category student scoring 5 in maths, 0 in physics and 3 in chemistry in JEE 2008, an SC/ST student who had scored up to 40% lower—3 in maths, 0 in physics and 1.8 in chemistry—was given a seat in the IITs. Now that relaxation will also be 50%.

MERIT CUT BY 50%
This year, the score of the last general category student to be admitted was 172 (out of 489). The cut-off for an scheduled caste or scheduled tribe student was 104, or 40% lower

Next year, assuming the general category cut-off remains the same, SC/ST students with 86 marks (50% of 172) will make the cut

Also, an SC/ST student with 2.5 marks in maths, 0 in physics and 1.5 in chemistry could squeeze into the prestigious institutes.

‘Lowering standards only way to fill quota’
Mumbai: Directors of the prestigious IITs have decided to further dilute admission norms for SC/ST students. In 2009, if the general category subject cut-offs remain constant, an SC/ST student with 2.5 in maths, 0 in physics and 1.5 in chemistry would squeeze into the hallowed institutes.

IIT-Guwahati director Gautam Barua told TOI, “The change has been brought about keeping in mind that the intake for SC/ST students will go up over the years.’’ Not only are there more seats for the reserved category candidates because of the eight new IITs, but the 27% OBC rollout, which requires the IITs to keep their general category seats intact, will see the intake for SC/STs go up by over 50% from 2008 to 2010 (see box).

Moreover, the IITs have also informed the HRD ministry that this year’s vacant seats would be carried forward and added to next year’s total seats.

The changes do not end there. Scores will be further lowered by another 50% for reserved category students who will be taken in for the IITs’ yearlong preparatory course (86 would be further lowered to 43). This course trains quota students for a year to equip them to qualify for the IITs. “Lowering academic standards is the only way to fill so many reserved category seats,’’ said a former JEE chairman.

IIT heads have also decided to alter the manner in which students are shortlisted for the IITs. Currently, the lowest 20% students are eliminated and a minimum cut-off score is decided. However, since the last two years, these rock-bottom qualifying marks have rendered the minimum subject-wise scores to be achieved meaningless. “We have decided to change the 80:20 rule. It will be a minor change. But we will now have more rational subject-wise cutoff scores,’’ added Barua.

Lastly, the directors have decided to write to the ministry to permit them to hold JEE-2009 in Singapore too. Currently, the exam is being conducted in 117 cities. For the first time this year, JEE-2008 was conducted in Dubai.

No SC/STs in six new IITs this year

66 Reserved Seats Will Be Filled In 2009

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

New Delhi/Mumbai: The six new IITs will not have any SC/ST student this year. The 66 vacancies for them (19 for SCs and 47 for STs) will now be filled next year, over and above the prescribed quota. No decision, however, has been taken on the 68 vacant seats in the Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad and 14 empty slots in IT-BHU (IT school in the Benaras Hindu University).

Meanwhile, preparatory classes in the old IITs will be larger than previous years. The number of students admitted to the year-long preparatory course is based on the vacancy of reserved category seats in each discipline in each IIT. As three of the total four seats reserved for Scheduled Tribe students in the chemical engineering stream at IIT-Delhi fell vacant, three ST students will be admitted to the preparatory course.

Taking that logic forward, the seven old IITs will admit 163 SC students and 216 ST students to the preparatory course, according to information put out by the joint admission board, and those seats will be considered as filled seats. Dhande and M S Ananth, director of IIT-Madras, hence said, all the reserved seats in the old IITs have been occupied. The preparatory course is a feeder class; it trains quota students for a year to equip them to qualify for the IITs. After a year, these students need to take a test and they are admitted to the IIT only if they clear the test.

But the preparatory course will not run in the new institutions which have 66 vacant seats. Recreating the Nehruvian style of institution building, the IITs have also decided to reach out to Indian researchers and engineers abroad to come back and join the new IITs. “In the 1950s, jobs were offered in canteens and offices. We have a goal of hiring 3,000 teachers over the next three years. We have decided to reach out to 50,000 engineers/researchers all over the world. Even if 500 come, it would be fine,’’ Sanjay Dhande, director of IIT, Kanpur, said after a meeting of the IIT heads here on Wednesday.

He also said it was payback time for the seven old IITs by mentoring the six new ones. Dhande said the vacancies of SC/STs of JEE 2008 in the six new IITs would be made available for the admission exercise of 2009 as a one-time measure.

This year, 3.11 lakh students took the JEE for 6,992 seats in 13 IITs. Of these, 414 seats were reserved for ST candidates, but only 159 were shortlisted. Similarly, only 690 were shortlisted for the 832 SC seats. The OBC figures were 1,099 out of 1,134. The IIT directors also said all attempts are being made to ensure the brand equity of the institutes does not get diluted.

Get CAT scores through SMS, email
Ahmedabad: For any Common Admission Test (CAT) applicant, more than the months of preparation, what seemed longer were the few hours that they had to spend in front of a computer, waiting for scores. But the candidates for CAT 2008 to be conducted by IIMs in November will not have to wait at all as their score will be announced by a beep. For the first time, the IIMs will be making the CAT scores available on SMS and e-mail. The option of seeing the score on the website and receiving a formal letter from the institute still exists, but the SMS and email will help the candidates learn of their scores sooner. The institute will close the selling of application forms on Thursday and the test will be conducted on November 16. The CAT results will be declared on January 9, 2009.

Vasundhara Vyas Mehta

Math and English on the STREET

The students of this school may up and move anytime, but the teacher will stay

Pronoti Datta | TNN

Ramesh Joshi hasn’t watched a film in over a year. On the rare occasion he’s free, the 18-year-old Virar resident permits himself to glimpse movie clips on the internet or listen to some bhangra. The rest of the day goes in long journeys on the train, attending Siddharth College, coaching teenagers as part of Akanksha’s social leadership programme and teaching street kids. “I like to be busy all the time,’’ he explains with a gravity that matches his prematurely grey hair. “An empty mind is the devil’s workshop.’’

Joshi’s missionary zeal to educate underprivileged kids led to Ashayein, a year-old project that involves teaching street children at Churchgate and Worli. The initiative is part of Youth Ventures, a programme that mentors 27 social entrepreneurs by giving them fellowships of Rs 10,000 to act on causes dear to them. Does his absence of a social life bother him? “When I serve people, I get a different kind of energy,’’ he says with a self-effacing quality that’s uncommon for someone his age.

It was only natural that Joshi chose to work with street kids. As a supervisor of a construction site at Cuffe Parade, his father helped poor children in the area get into schools. The student decided to take up where his father had left off and began to scout around for kids to teach. He zeroed in on a group of children who live across Fashion Street near Churchgate and a bunch that calls the area behind Worli’s Adarsh Nagar slums home. (The Worli branch is run by Joshi’s friend Tauqeer Sheikh.)

Thrice a week, Joshi, four volunteers and eight to 12 children occupy a quiet corner of the street to study. The pupils are between the ages of six and 14 and while most of them attend school, there are a few who are too poor to afford formal education. “We teach them whatever they feel like learning that day,’’ says Joshi. While the volunteers communicate with the children in Hindi, they teach them both Hindi and English as well as math.

Most of the kids’ parents have been supportive as they want better futures for their offspring. However, Joshi has had to field abuse from parents who consider education an indulgence and would rather their kids lend a hand at home. The social worker’s efforts have paid off. Just over two weeks into Ashayein, Joshi was given a pleasant surprise by one of his students, Sachin, who perfectly recited the English alphabet and showed off handwriting that was remarkably beautiful for an untutored kid. In “two-three weeks I made such a difference’’, Joshi muses. “If I continue like this the children will bloom.’’

However, given the nomadic lives of pavement dwellers, Joshi is afraid that he might one day find that his students have upped and left or been evicted. “I hope I continue with the same kids,’’ he says. “I only pray they let me make a difference in their lives.’’ The children have, in turn, made a profound impact on Joshi. “I’m more confident than before,’’ he points out. Ashayein has been one step forward in a series of efforts at overcoming his inhibitions. He spent six years training in naval exercises with the Sea Cadet Corp at Colaba. Two years ago, he joined Akanksha’s social leadership programme as a trainer educating teenagers about relevant issues such as the environment and child sexual abuse. He might wear his modesty like a badge, but there’s no mistaking Joshi’s supreme self-assurance.

The metamorphosis Joshi is experiencing is an indication that Youth Ventures has been a success, according to its director Vipin T. The aim of the programme is not “the impact the participants have on society but the transformative experience.’’ The 27 changemakers, he hopes, will engender a community of people who will alter the perception of social work, which continues to be regarded as the purview of people in “torn kurtas’’, to something that is “an integral part of life’’.

(This is part of an Independence Day series on youngsters who have chosen to light a candle rather than curse the darkness)

FROM SIR, WITH LOVE: A stone’s throw from Churchgate Station, a pavement turns into a patshala