Foreign Perspectives

It looks like we’re going to find ourselves in the unusual position of getting going on redoing two bathrooms and two kitchens.

Sounds like a bit of a nightmare I’m sure but it’s even worse than that as one set is in the UK and the other is in what seems likely to become our holiday home in France in the next month or two. Unfortunately, it means trawling round two sets of places to find all the stuff to do the work as it’s not really a runner to buy it all in one and ship it to the other.

Since we’re looking to decorate both places in a similar manner we’re currently trying to find a ceramic tile design that’s available in both sides of the water but, of course, that’s not as simple as you would think.

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One of the problems that I have in choosing which courses to go for is that a number of those that I’d quite like to do fall into the category of “difficult” for one reason or another.

In some cases that’s not so bad I can, for instance, work up to the astrophysics course by starting with a very doable maths course and working up to astrophysics itself via a series of stepping stone courses. So, in principle, the astrophysics is quite an achievable goal for me. However, some of the other courses don’t have those easy stepping stones and, for example, the human biology course that I’ve pencilled in for next year looks like it will be rather difficult in a number of areas. The snag is that in that particular case human biology is itself the stepping stone that I felt I needed for biological psychology which I’ll be doing in a few years time.

One plus point is that, at the moment, the most difficult courses seem to be 30 pointers rather than the 60 point courses that I’ve been doing the last few years. So, in principle, if I do hit a really rough patch with one then I should be able to devote more time to it.

Still, if I was able to manage level 3 French, I’m sure that I’ll be able to get through a couple of level 2 biology courses.

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One of the problems with doing a degree with the OU is that it’s a very long drawn out affair taking anything from six years upwards in most cases. That long period in turns means that there can be quite a turnover in the courses available during the course of one’s degree.

For example, when I was going through my (far too long) list of potential courses for the next couple of years recently I found that there’s quite a lot of them that will have reached the end of their life before I’ll have gotten around to doing them. That’s not really so much of a problem as it might appear to be in that the majority of courses are replaced by updated versions of what went before. For example, whilst I’ve got DSE212 Exploring Psychology in my schedule since it only runs to 2011 I may well be doing whatever its successor is. Where it is an issue is that the psychology courses come with expiry dates so that 10 years after a version of a course ceases, you can’t count it towards a psychology degree eg in my case the Child Development course that I’m currently doing will expire in 2023 because this edition of the course will only run to 2012. Granted, that 10 year plus validity isn’t usually a major problem in that the degree programmes generally run over around six years but it means that you can’t really take a break from the psychology degree as easily as you can for other degree programmes.

What’s a little more disconcerting is that A251 World Archaeology which was only introduced last year and which went straight into my short-list as it sounds brilliant is finishing the year before I’d have been doing it. Why that should be so I don’t know for sure but the extreme range of comments about it (“best course ever” through to “total waste of time”) might have something to do with that. If that’s the case, then any rewrite could be substantially different than the current course. Unfortunately, I’ll probably not know whether or not there’s going to be a successor to it for a couple of years so if I want to do it, I’ll have to rejig my schedule yet again.

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