The educational Ambush :P

Hey guys, I am a part of the educational ambush along with Vibha, Kaushik and Pio...

We decided on our plan of action today in college... We are looking forward to highlight the differences in the educational methodologies between Indian students and our Swedish counterparts.

To do this we will be interviewing different students and hopefully teachers. Vibha also suggested handing out a questionnaire to the students to see what they feel about various issues ranging from preparation to evaluation of papers.

We are awaiting suggestion from active followers ;)

Help us out guys !!

Grrrrrrrrrrr..........how our Ambush racked our brains !!!

Today our Ambush (group of tigers) which included Barkha, Gretchen, Megann and Dorothy met to discuss and decide upon a strategy regarding our project to be implemented in Sweden – the study of the culture of the Swedish community, various customs of the Swedes, their festivities, historical structures and so on and so forth.
A lot of roaring and growling went on, all the tigers hacked and racked their brains for a while and finally we hit upon some sort of plan. We decided that we would go through various sources of information especially the Internet to collect information relating to historical structures,monuments et all in Sweden as also various festivals of the Swedes. All in all when we tigers land in Sweden we would already know something about the culture of the Swedes. The group would also speak to the Swedish students and other people in the Tullinge campus when we are in Sweden.
We ended the day satisfied that we tigers have decided on a strategy to achieve our mission …..

- Sonia

here,s our health ambush plan!

well....Merel, Divya, Urvi and myself. we will be working on the health and hygiene project in Sweden. Today we got together and discussed certain matters we want to focus on. Ma'm Uma Masur helped us out with the planning. At the end of it we listed certain topics we would like to focus on. First of all we decided that our study will be based mostly if not entirely on campus. We have come up with a plan of surveying the waste management and hygiene in the campus of Tullinge Gymnasium by forming a questionnaire and questioning the students/faculty on campus. we would like to focus on infrastructural hygiene, canteen- the way they dispose and treat the canteen waste, the waste management and disposal methods implemented there, health and medicinal facilities provided to students and since the Swedish Students are "health care" students we are sure we will gain many health care tips from them :) we are on our way of formulating a questionnaire and thus we are open to ideas and suggestions!!!! the plan is to study health and hygiene management at Tullinge Gymnasium and our college too and see if we can adopt some beneficial measures.

Our plan of actions in Sweden !!

Hi,
you all are aware that we are going to present "India Day in Sweden", and you also know that we are going to perform a cultural show depicting India through dances of different states as well as statewise presentation of our clothing through Fashion show. Our students are really working hard guys! What you dont know is that we have plans to serve snacks of Goa and menu is like, Salted cashew nuts, shev, bibinca, doshe(diamond shape sweet) etc. yummy no! The important thing what we are doing is planning seriously for our main objective of this programme.We are dividing all 12 students in three groups, depending on their personal interests to concentrate on three specific areas. One is educational methodology and system, the second is health and hygiene on the campus and the third is language and culture. For this our students are having discussions, they are thinking, surfing and trying to streamline the entire methodology in what ways they can gather information ie. survey or interview or any other methods. Our final aim is to see if we can incorporate good practices,which we will find during our visit, in our College after we return.We have chosen the themes to be school-centric, so that students do not have to go out of the school for collecting lot of information. Our students have also planned to do presentations on their areas of study once they return. Dont miss it. Its going to be very informative!!!! If you have some suggestions with this regard you are most welcome, really!!! Post on this blog..... we are waiting.......
Uma Masur

Some pics n clicks...

Here is some of the fun that goes on during our practice sessions....

But i must say, this is just the tip of the iceberg !!

We have finally decided on a concrete programme that we shall put up on the "India day" on the 17th of March !!!

Sing a song & Dance along :D

We have now trained out voices to sing the wonderful mandos of Goa....and although most of us are not Mariah Carey's, we still sound pretty awesome as a group. We even managed to procure and incorporate a traditional Goan musical instrument called the ghumat in our mando.

Next on the agenda is the Bollywood dance number. The songs are finalized and almost edited. It sounds fabulous! Now its just the last stage of us shaking out legs to the music..:D

अब दूरी सही न जाये !
That just means.. Can't wait anymore!
Finally, today we submitted our final visa forms and our passport to Sir Dange. The college is collectively sending all the applications with Sir Dange. To get our visa, he will be moving to Delhi, the capital city of India. Woo.. .. . .! by the end of next week we will have our visas in our hands!

17th February 2011 ( Thursday )

Today we had our final meeting about our preparations for our trip to Sweden. There are a lot of things to prepare and concern about. Mainly, we discussed about our visa forms and the details to be filled in certain formats so that our forms are clean and neat. We were requested to submit our duly filled forms along with our demand drafts at the office. In a week or so Sir Dange will be leaving for Delhi on behalf of us, to submit the forms. Thereby avoiding the inconvenience caused for us 12 students to travel together as a group all the way to Delhi. Hopefully everything will be systematically sorted out and all of us will get our visas approved.

For all those who think size does not matter…………….SIZE DOES MATTER!!!!

Well as we all know it’s going to be freezing cold in Sweden when we visit The Tullinge Gymnasium. We were asked to give jacket sizes and shoe sizes as we will be provided with jackets and shoes suitable for the climate prevailing in Sweden. The problem arrived when we were asked for jacket and shoe sizes as per the American and European size charts. All of us were confused!! Megann of course was an exception to the confusion as she had the conversion chart on her sneakers itself!! Some of us even tried to measure our foot with Megann’s just incase our sizes met and we got lucky too ;-). Amidst all this chaos over sizes and conversions Amishi Saglani helped us out as usual by mailing us the size conversion charts. She also explained how to go about the charts. Ma’m Sonia helped me out by providing me with a link that had systematic details of size conversions. Finally all of us managed to give in our jacket and shoe sizes as per the American and European size charts. After all the hustle we went through…whew…..

Now we just count the days till 14^th March arrives and hope that the sizes we have given are right!

Gauravi Keni

Preparation for our eagerly anticipated trip

Finally, the days for our student exchange trip can be counted on our fingers (almost)! We have all decided our group mission statement, our individual statement,... Now we just have to give the final touched to the cultural program that we will be performing in Sweden and we will be all set to dazzle one and all :) Today we had our group meeting with Mr. Dange and we are almost ready to submit our visa's. And yeah, i almost forgot, three cheers to my attempts at singing the famed 'mandos', my mom said she could actually figure out the konkani lyrics in my English accent! whoopie!

Merel DSilva

Feb 12, 2011 (Saturday)

Today's practice was for the Mando again. But unlike yesterday, we got a lot of practice done. The class was open today, but instead we chose to sit in the corridor again. The entire group split into two. One went inside class practicing the Bharatnatyam dance and the others had a seat outside for the Mando. The Bharatnatyam group finished their choreography today and we finished deciding the sequence of the songs. We had a lot of fun too, pulling Dorothy's leg and then calling Gauravi names. We also made some new jokes which we would personally share with everyone when we come there.

More tidbits about our practice sessions …..

We have all started practicing for our small little program in Sweden. The practices are anything but fun ! We started with the Mando ( Konkani/Portuguese songs) and the Bharatanatyam .The practices begin at 4p.m and end by 5.15p.m or 5.30.We end up sitting in the corridors near the Geo-informatics lab even though some classrooms are free. It feels good to sit at the highest spot in college as it kinda allows better circulation of ideas !

At the end of the day we all end up laughing and giggling due to the funny pronunciation and translations by our group members.

Like for example, “FUL HANV” was misinterpreted as “FOOL HANV” !

Merel here thought that “YA YA MAYA YA” meant “Come to MAMA’s house” !

“MHAKA NAKA TUJEM PERU” - we were all wondering why would someone offer their lover a GUAVA ?? Silly, right ?

We ended up naming each other - some terms of endearment here and there..
Kaushik is The Duke of Suar,I on the other hand am The Dutchess of Suar…..and we happily look after our Suar Land !

Gauravi yesterday was hit with a dose of laughing gas ! She ended up giggling at everything we said..…we ended up marrying our dear Dorothy to a guy called Thome who wore loads of flowers on his hair…..Thome here is a character from a popular Mando called Sogle Rati Bhaikode…..

That’s all for now !! Will keep you all updated on more madness !

Cheers

Feb 11, 2011 (Friday)

We did not get to practice much today...
Today in the evening session after our lectures, we decided to meet up and practice for the annual day programme. Our usual place to do all our practice is the Geography lab, but today was a bit different.
Instead of the lab, the corridor outside it served our purpose. We sat on the floor and practiced the Mando. We sang many Konkani songs and finally decided to perform a few for the programme. Gretchen Barretto, one of the amazing singers of our group led us through the entire practice session.
The whole session lasted for about an hour, during which we not only practiced the songs, but also found the time to have fun sharing jokes, laughing at each other and making jokes about the mistakes we made.

Grooming session for the Tigers

A “Personality grooming and development” course was conducted on the 18th 19th and 20th of November for all the 20 students short listed for the exchange program. We were excited to attend this workshop which was to be conducted by Mrs. Charmaine Godinho, an accomplished model herself.
In the first session, she spoke about politeness and stressed on the frequent use of words like THANK YOU, SORRY, PLEASE etc. We had to break our silly rules like “friends never thank each other” and follow the new rules.
In the second session, she explained to us how to present ourselves to make a better first impression.
In the third session, we discussed the dos and don’ts of socializing .We learnt how important it was to respond to invitations, stick to dress codes and punctuality.
In the fourth session, we discussed wardrobe essential s and things we should keep in mind while dressing up.
We revised our etiquette in the other sessions and also worked on the pronunciations of some French words included in English. We totally enjoyed the 3 days of this workshop and also learnt so much from this workshop.

Why we Tigers are going to Sweden…..our mission

We met a number of times in our College and asked ourselves – Why are we going to Sweden? What we will we do in Sweden ?
We thought and roared and growled amongst ourselves before finalizing our mission statement.
Here’s what it is ….
“To explore the cultural ethos and teaching-learning methodologies and approaches to hygienic living of the Swedish community.”
How will we achieve our mission we asked ourselves ?
Obviously by organizing ourselves into ambushes, we reasoned. Hey, a group of us(tigers) is called an Ambush!
The Ambush on “Educational methodologies comprises of Tigers Vibha, Pio, Kaushik and Anjali – they decided to observe various aspects such as conduct of classroom learning, theory and practical classes, prior preparation by students and teachers, timetables, etc.
The Ambush on “Cultural fabric” consists of Tigers Barkha Naik,Dorothy Furtado, Meegan and Gretchen – they decided to study the culture of the Swedish community, the various customs, festivities, historical structures and so on and so forth.
The Ambush on “Health and Hygiene” will have Tigers Divyarani Revankar, Gauravi Keni, Urvi and Merel – they would concentrate on general hygiene followed in the campus, waste management and general wellness of students and faculty such as participation in sports, etc.
All the tigers roared that we would regularly take stock of and contribute to activities in other ambushes as well. We would be ably guided in our mission by our elder Tigers Dange,Uma,Sonia and Oliver.
Roaaaaar………..we are on a mission to Sweden !!!!!

Rooooaaarrrrrr...... here's who we are !!!!!

Hi,I am Ashok Dange, the Co-ordinator for the Athena Exchange program. I am a management and finance and corporate law professional. I retired as finance and corporate law Director from Chowgule and Company Ltd. I am involved in college activities since 1981 and now full time as a Coordinator of the Counselling, Career and Vocational Guidance Centre for the last four years.
I live in Rangavi Estate near Bogmalo Beach with my wife, a dog ' Tej ' and three mango trees ( two have flowered this year, so lots of mangoes).My daughter is married and lives in Washington, U.S.A. I recently became a proud grandfather.I have done a bit of trekking, regular swimming in Bogmalo since 1981 (without fail on Sundays and public holidays )and gardening.
I would like to do everything possible to bring out hidden skills and
talents of the students as long as possible.

Hello, I am Dr. Uma Masur. I am an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Botany. I am in the teaching profession since last 14 years and I like to experiment in teaching-learning methods. I also enjoy researching in my subject and have a minor research project to my credit.
Going to Tullinge Sweden is definitely going to widen my horizon in the field of education, culture and health and hygiene in the campus and will make me look at the problem with global perspective. My husband is also in the same profession and takes interest in fine arts like theatre and films. My son is going to be nine years old and he is my inspiration in whatever I do.

Hi. I am Dr Sonia Da Costa.I am an Assistant Professor in Chowgule College in the English Department. Well, my hobbies include reading novels, surfing the Internet and I also like being aware of new trends happening in college and in the society. My strengths are my patience,my ability to assimilate the good things around me and adapt to changes. My husband is an Engineer who is also into the teaching profession and he is the source of my strength. The apple of our eye is our lovely and loving daughter who is going to turn four years very soon.
I am looking forward to visit Tullinge Gymnasium and meeting and interacting with the students and faculty. hope to gain valuable insights into the teaching-learning methodologies employed at Tullinge Gymnasium as well as have a peek into the cultural fabric of the Swedish people as well as their hygienic practices. I hope this trip helps me to become a more enriched person.

Hey. My name is Gauravi Keni. I live in Navelim, Goa with my parents. In my free time i like to read novels, poems, watch movies and also mimick :)
I would like to go into journalism or interior designing. I am very much looking forward to this trip. Its going to be a once in a lifetime experience and i wish to make the most of it.

Hi.My name is Anjali Mehta. I'm 18.I'm doing my Bachelor's in Arts with a subject combination of psychology, Economics and Philosophy. I intend to major in Psychology and Philosophy. I love dancing and I have been learning Indian Classical dance.I live in Margao with my parents, 3 siblings and my grand parents. This trip to Sweden will be very exciting

Hey! I'm Gretchen Barretto, a 16 year old girl who is very enthusiastic about the people and the things in her life.I enjoy music a lot andlove to sing. For me,music is like the ultimate! i love being around people i love ....they include my parents and my awesome friends, your parents, and who you are in society, and the experiences that u have..... 'What I expect from the trip' – I expect adventure, and an experience that will hopefully mould my future and make it a journey to remember!
I live with my mother and sister. My dad works in the merchant navy.My dreams and aspirations.......I have many!!! I wish to make it big as a journalist, but I also dream of becoming a psychologist.

Hi! I am Kaushik Dessai. I stay at Fatorda with my parents & a sibling. I am a student of XI std. I love philately, gardening and reading. I also like to study the culture of other people & hence would like to come to Sweden. I would also like to once again meet our Swedish friends who had come to India in December 2010.
I pursue to join the administrative services after my graduation in law. I would love to work with people from different backgrounds & for the development of my nation as a superpower. I expect to study the educational system of Sweden during my stay there. I would also like to see how people live in Sweden. I also expect to study the overall development of this wonderful country and would not like to miss a chance of experiencing the beauty of this country known as 'the beauty on sea.' So, see you in Sweden.

Hello everyone. My name is Merel DSilva. I come from the picturesque village of Chandor in Goa. I live with my parents, my brother and my beloved pet cat. My hobbies include listening to music, adventure spots(kayaking and trekking), cycling, reading suspense novels, surfing
the internet, watching movies,... Joining Chowgule College is one of the best decisions of my life. I intend on majoring in either Math or Geography, then doing my masters in Science
and if luck favors, work abroad.I am one of the lucky 12 to have been selected or the exchange program and even though I have been to quite a few counties abroad, Sweden is one place I'm really eager to visit. Everything I have heard and seen about it has really caught my interest. I cant wait to be there. Cheers!

Hi, my name is Divyarani S. Revankar . I am studying in First Year Bachelor of Science in the subjects Chemistry, Botany and Zoology. My hobbies are singing, dancing, sketching, designing henna, etc. besides I like to make new friends,learn new things and help people whenever they are in need. I live with my mom , dad and my younger brother. I like to spend quality time with my family. I give due respect to my elders and dislike those who shun them. My strength is the trust that my parents have in me .

Hello everyone! I am Dorothy Furtado and I’m pursuing my First Year Bachelors in Science and studying Chemistry, Botany and Zoology. I intend majoring in Zoology with honors’ and working my way up in the research field of Marine Biology. Apart from academics I love sketching, trekking, listening to music, travelling and making new friends.
As I am highly interested in experiencing new cultures and ideas, being part of this exchange program would be a learning experience I would cherish for life. As an Indian I would like to share with the Swedish students our values, cultural and social ideas that we have grown up learning, as well as understand their lives, as this goes a long way in making us youth more open and accepting of each other, rather than just tolerant.

Hi ! I’m Megann D’souza and I am a first year BA student. I come from a splendid village called Cuncolim.I live with my parents and my younger brother.After completing my graduation I would want to pursue an MBA degree in Human resource.In the future I see myself travelling the world, visiting various countries and having a first hand experience of their culture,their cuisine and other unique aspects of the country that stand out.My hobbies are reading,travelling,writing and sports.
I am really excited about the forthcoming trip to Sweden as Sweden’s been a country that I’ve always wanted to visit and travelling being of my passions. On our visit there I am looking forward to know more about the country, the people, the food, the architecture and to learn more about the history of Sweden directly from the people.
Here is to a memorable trip…..cheers…..

Hey everybody, this Pio Colaco here. I am currently pursuing my first year of the Bachelor's degree in Science in the Chowgule College. My favorite subject is Chemistry and I intend majoring in it. I live in the Port town of Vasco Da Gama in Goa along with my parents and a younger sister. During my free time, writing poems and still photography keeps me occupied. My hobbies include sight-seeing, interacting with people and learning about new cultures and traditions. In the near future I see myself doing research in Organic Chemistry and also continuing with poetry. The most special people in my life are my friends and family and I
love them a lot. Looking forward to this trip to Sweden and all the fun we shall have there.

Hi, I am Barkha Naik. I study in Eleventh standard at the Chowgule College in the Arts stream. My subjects are Economics,Sociology,Political Science,English,French and logic. I love photography, acting and dancing. I have done Arangetram ie. Diploma in Bharatnatyam which is an Indian form of classical dance. I have also won the National Balashree in creative performances.

Hello everyone my name is Vibha Algundgi. I'm pursuing my Bachelor's degree in Arts. My subject combinations are Psychology, Philosophy, and Economics. Having taken this combination, I intend to major in Psychology. Apart from this, I have a keen interest in music, and I'm learning Indian Classical Music. I stay at a place called Ponda, with my parents, my elder sister and a dog named Jimmy. The visit to Sweden through this Student-Faculty Exchange Programme will be a turning point in my life as I will be experiencing a whole new country, a whole new culture which really excites me. See you all soon there!

My name is Urvi Khandeparker. I am presently doing my First Year Computer Science at Smt. Parvatibai Chowgule College. I reside in Gogol.
My hobbies include dancing, singing, gardening and playing the Harmonium. I have learnt Hindustani classical music for five years . I have also taken training in the Indian classical dance form that is Bharatnatyam for the past 8 years and I am still continuing to do so. Bharatnatyam to me is not just an art form but a way of life that has chiseled my personality. I also have a lot of interest in sports.
I love to make friends and I am a kind of a person who easily gets along with people. I believe in hard work and patience, to me these are the two important keys to success. I love the IT field and hence I aspire to pursue my further studies in MCA.