ALL EARS: Students of B.V. Reddy School keenly listening to a resource person as he explains the features of a daily at the Newspaper in Education (NIE) programme, organised in Chittoor on Friday.

CHITTOOR: To the question on what constitutes a newspaper, one can expect a high school student to refer to it merely as a medium that communicates day-to-day happenings around the world to its readers.

It was just this that the students of the Chittoor-based B.V. Reddy Senior Secondary School said, but later learnt to their pleasant surprise that it has more to it than meets the eye.

Novel programme

Newspaper In Education (NIE), a novel programme conceived by The Hindu to inculcate the habit of paper-reading among the students and use it as a teaching tool as well, was introduced for the first time in Chittoor town on Friday, after it became a roaring success in Tirupati and Nellore.

The management of the school became the first to embrace the concept. With this, the programme is all set to benefit 9,000 students in Chittoor district alone in the next few months.

Specially-trained resource persons G. Vijaykumar and Mani Maran from Chennai conducted the sessions for VII, VIII and IX standard students wherein they dwelt at length on subjects like language skills, public speaking and handling examinations, apart from giving a basic introduction to the origin of The Hindu and its phenomenal growth as a leading and balanced newspaper.

The students too participated in the interactive sessions with great enthusiasm and expressed happiness at the replacement of `teaching' with `imparting'.

A student, Vijay, opined that the programme eliminated the element of boredom in the learning process, as they were no more confined to classroom education.

A pleasure

Another student, Latha, expressed happiness that the co-curricular activity will definitely make learning a pleasure.

Principal C.P. Jayaprakash lauded the efforts of The Hindu in planning an activity that added finer features to the general academic programme.

Following its immense success, it soon plans to extend the programme to four more schools in Chittoor town - Kings School, R.K. Model School, Geervani School and Margadarsi School.

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