I have a calendar life that is complicated, so I use BusyCal and Google Calendar. I keep two different browsers open to avoid some confusion. I enter calendar dates with time zones, which I can't do on my iPhone. I watch DVD's since I don't have broad- band where I live. I record videos for promotions and interviews and it's handy to have the notes in front of me on the screen. I do a lot of Skype interviews and it's handy to see notes for those as well. I often copy from one source (web page maybe) to an email I'm composing.
I read Google news and use NetNewsWire to keep up with general and tech news. I use it when I travel for Slingbox. I'm better on the large keyboard. The larger screen is great for maps and photo viewing. I also keep tons of music and movies on the SSD, although the smaller size cramps me over a full HD. I often take notes regarding business talks and paste them into TextEdit docs to view during phone calls. These calls I usually make with my iPhone. I use FileChute to upload files that I want to distribute but which are too large for email. I use Dropbox to share with my iPhones. I'm always backed up with my home Time Capsule. I write AppleScripts, too.
Most of my photos I collect with iPhoto but I use Aperture for my finer photos, mostly from my Leica M9. I keep reminder links and files on my desktop and I have categories (folders) in my dock for things like "fun relief" and "important". I keep folders on my desktop for things like the songs I'm currently attracted to and upcoming speech events. I also keep many notes of info I need all the time, like home IP numbers and game scores, in Stickies, but I close Stickes to keep things neater. I also have a few games in my dock for Hands free access.
When Sunny Varkey was 4 years old, his parents left him in the care of family members in his native India while they “went to seek green pastures” teaching English as a second language in Dubai in the late 1950s, in what was then a sleepy British protectorate on the southeast coast of the Gulf.
“My parents were brought over by Easa Saleh al-Gurg, who later became the United Arab Emirates ambassador to Great Britain,” he said in a recent interview in London. “Our family came with empty hands, but in those days the U.A.E. was a land of opportunity.”
Initially his parents’ pupils came almost exclusively from local families, but the discovery of oil in Dubai in 1966 brought an influx of foreign workers, many from the Asian Subcontinent. Two years later, Mr. Varkey’s parents opened Our Own English High School, the first private school in Dubai for Indian students. Meanwhile Mr. Varkey was completing his own education, first at a Catholic boarding school in India and then in Dubai, followed by a year at a college on the Isle of Wight, in Britain.
“I did not study much,” Mr. Varkey said. He joined his parents in 1970, just before Dubai gained its independence from Britain, and took over the company in 1980, starting with his parents’ single school in Dubai.
Although he never attended university himself, he now runs GEMS Education, which claims to be the largest private provider of K-12 education in the world, and presides over a network of about 70 schools operating in 18 countries, from the United States to Britain, Egypt to China. His two sons, Dino and Jay, now hold senior positions at the company, making it a three-generation endeavor.
In addition to owning schools with a total of 130,000 students, the Dubai-based company also manages schools and school systems on government contracts and acts as consultants in the Philippines and several African countries.
Despite his company’s growing influence, Mr. Varkey has long avoided the media spotlight. But with more recent moves into Britain and the United States, that seems to have changed. In February the company hosted the first Global Education and Skills Forum in Dubai, bringing together 500 delegates to discuss the relationship between governments and the private sector. It included Bill Clinton, the former U.S. president who was recently named honorary chairman of the Varkey GEMS Foundation, the company’s philanthropic arm.
Mr. Varkey’s increasing prominence has also brought greater scrutiny both of his business model and his educational philosophy. From the beginning, the GEMS schools in Dubai took for granted a kind of ethnic segregation.
“We had an Indian school, we had a Pakistani school. We also opened a British school,” where “we had key British teachers — the head of school, head of curriculum, and so on, as well as a number of Asian teachers,” Mr. Varkey said.
The company remains the largest employer of British teachers outside of the United Kingdom, as well as the largest employer of Indian teachers outside of India. Pay scales at each school are linked not to the local economy or the nature of the school, but to salaries in a teacher’s home country.
And while the company boasts that it provides the same high-quality education at its least-expensive schools (where fees are approximately $750 a year) as it does at premium schools (where fees can exceed $40,000), there has been criticism at both ends of the scale.
In 2008, parents with children at the GEMS Jumeirah Primary School in Dubai wrote to Mr. Varkey after class sizes were increased. There have also been complaints about sharp increases in school fees and the closure of the Westminster School in Dubai after the country’s school regulator would not raise a cap on private school tuition.
Jane Donovan’s two daughters, now aged 10 and 7, have attended GEMS Wellington since they moved to Dubai three years ago. In Britain, they had attended a private school with similar tuition fees.
“I can see how it would be a struggle for parents who, for the first time, have to pay for education because there is no public option for them,” she said, referring to the fact that expatriates in the U.A.E. do not have the same access to free public education that local citizens do, or that they would have had back in their home countries.
“But we were paying anyway back home, and we were very happy with the quality of teaching and school grounds at GEMS,” Mrs. Donovan said.
When challenged on class size, Mr. Varkey pointed to airlines, which offer first class, business and economy seats on the same plane, or to Mercedes, which produces several classes of cars.
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