British kids help rural French schools survive

Eymet (France): The avalanche of English people moving to the southwest Dordogne region of France each year is having an unexpected benefit on rural French schools once in danger of closing.

“The current political will is to close down schools and services in small rural areas and centralise them in towns. Happily, the English like to live in small, rural areas and send their children to local schools,” said Bruno Arfeuille, a roving teacher who gives French lessons to new arrivals.

Because not only do the schools welcome the children with open arms, they also provide them with French lessons.

Arfeuille is one of two such teachers and currently has more than 100 students in different schools around the area, which counts between 5,000 and 10,000 Britons. They have been drawn by the laidback lifestyle, warm climate and the lower cost of living. “The girls are always faster than the boys, but it takes about three months to a year for the children to learn French, depending on their level when they arrive,” Arfeuille said.

At the local school in Eymet, a village of 2,600 inhabitants with such a high population of English speakers that one was recently elected as a town councillor, Arfeuille has a class of six.

Arfeuille, who is paid by the state, also gives French lessons to other new arrivals: from Portugal, Turkey, Morocco, Russia, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Thailand. He started in 1999 when he was asked to teach children of refugees who had fled the fighting in Kosovo.

According to his figures, between 200 and 300 new children arrive every year to start school in the Dordogne area. Over the last three years the figures have tapered off somewhat from 336 new foreign children in 2005, to 203 this year.

Asked if there is any resentment at so many new arrivals, Arfeuille says not at all. “They bring life to the area, and to the schools.” AFP

LEARNING CURVE: Bruno Arfeuille, a roving teacher, gives French lessons to new arrivals at a school in France

Fine print: Published in India

High Textbook Prices In US Force Pupils To Buy Cheap Indian Editions Online

Textbooks in the US are priced so high that even used versions can give students a sharp pain in the wallet. The seventh edition of Francis A Carey’s Organic Chemistry—a standard text for pre-med students—costs $213 new and somewhere around $150 used. Add to that the companion study guide ($113 new; $90 used) and a student would pay between $326 and $240 for just one class. With four to five classes a semester—many assigning multiple textbooks—the costs multiply.

The same edition of Organic Chemistry, however, is available on a Canadian website called Abe-Books.com for $12, Time magazine said. The book is an international edition, printed in English but sold in India, and identical to its pricey American counterpart except for its soft cover. With a click of the mouse, a cash-strapped student could save hundreds of dollars.

According to the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, US textbook prices rose 186% between 1986 and 2004, or twice the rate of inflation. College students now spend roughly $900 on textbooks every academic year, books they are required by their professors to purchase. This disconnect between the buyer and the seller allows publishing companies to inflate prices for textbook editions evem on subjects that haven’t changed. “Of course you’d update the computer science textbooks every year, but do you really need a brand new edition of a calculus book?” asks Luke Swarthout, a higher education advocate at the US Public Interest Research Group.

International textbooks are printed—regularly in India, although sometimes in other Asian nations—under copyright agreements with Western publishers that allow the books to be sold for a discounted price. “The reasoning is that people in other countries can’t afford the higher prices,” said Swarthout, “so this is a way to provide them with the same quality of education as we get in America.”

But just as the internet has enabled illegal access to music and movies, so too has it opened the international book market—especially to the hands of college students, Time said. International textbooks are available on major bookselling websites including Amazon and eBay. It’s legal for students to buy them for personal use, but illegal for anyone to resell them outside of their intended country. “It’s a copyright infringement not for the person buying but for the person selling,” says Jane Ginsburg, a professor at Columbia Law School.

Individual sellers that use eBay or AbeBooks are breaking the law, says Ginsburg, but whether the sites are also liable for the auctions is unclear. Ebay recently won a court case absolving it of responsibility for policing its auctions for counterfeit items but international textbooks are not technically counterfeit. Like eBay, AbeBooks acts as a third party for sellers—generally stores in foreign countries. One copy of Organic Chemistry found on its site was being sold by a bookstore in New Delhi.

Last year, Stephanie Rodgers, then a senior at Vanderbilt University, bought a brand new, international edition of a physics textbook for $75 on eBay instead of the $298 US version for sale in the university’s bookstore. The only difference between the two was the fact that the US textbook was divided into three separate volumes, while the international version came as one book. Rodgers also purchased a $68 mathematical logic textbook ($130 new), which was nearly identical to her classmates’ version except that it was paperback instead of hardcover. “Which is fine, because I prefer paperback,” says Rodgers. AGENCIES

Rambhai chaiwalla ban gaya IIM prof

Vijaysinh Parmar & Ashish Vashi | TNN

Ahmedabad: The view that he gets of the IIM-Ahmedabad campus is from a tiny hole in the boundary wall through which he delivers cups of tea to the students and faculty inside. But when Rambhai Kori, 51, who runs a tea stall near the IIM-A gate, sat in a classroom on Thursday on a chair meant for professors, the chaiwalla had arrived in life.

The moment captured the strong links with Rambhai’s kettle (RBK, for short) cherished by every individual who has been to this premier business school in the last 25 years. The bond got cemented on Thursday in a paper titled ‘RBK—A Role to be Understood’ presented in the Faculty Development Program-08 at IIM-A.

Rambhai, who still remembers his first customer Omprakash Manchanda, seemed at home in the classroom when Umesh Neelakantan, Sonal Katewa and Jaspreet Ahulwalia made a presentation on him. He made interventions during the discussions and spoke confidently. The comfort level came from the fact that there’s hardly anyone on campus he doesn’t know by name. And it’s not without reason that the alumni have been staying in touch for years together on www.rambhai.com. Students described him in the presentation as “light hearted, simple and loveable’’. “His way of talking and mingling with students and delivering products to clients says so much about his time management,’’ observed Katewa. “Rambhai is a great human being and a great brand by himself. Relationships are the life and blood of his business,’’ said Ahulwalia.

Within minutes of the presentation, Rambhai was back at RBK. “Maja aaya,’’ (I enjoyed it) he remarked to his clients, as he served tea. “I interact with these students every day, but it was a different experience doing the same on the other side of this boundary wall.’’

CUPPA OF JOY BRIMMETH OVER: Rambhai Kori at his tea stall outside IIM-Ahmedabad

Workshop to deal with vandalism in school

Mumbai: While activists and government bodies have set up countless organisations to combat violence against children, vandalism in schools and the resulting fear that spreads amongst staff, has rarely found a voice.

In order to help heads of educational institutions deal with vandalism, both by political parties as well as individuals, Coffeetable, a support group for principals set up by the Counsellor’s Association of India (CAI’s), is organising a workshop for principals and counsellors where they can share their own experiences and learn how to handle a mob in the classroom. The workshop will be held on September 16 at St Xavier’s Academy in Marine Lines. Minister of state for higher education Suresh Shetty will be present at the workshops.

For details on the workshop, contact coffeetablemumbai@yahoo.in or call Adelaide Vaz 22014666 or Harish Shetty on 9820032178. TNN

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