Foreign Perspectives

There’s only one in fact and he’s the caretaker so to make a start on balancing things up they’re having a Dad’s reading week at the moment.

It turns out that it’s not quite so easy to get the Dad’s to do this. Besides the reluctance of people to volunteer for anything, there’s the matter of getting out of work to do it. There’s also the little problem that the Dad’s very rarely go on the school outings and therefore don’t have the necessary criminal records check. Net effect is that there’s only three of us doing it for the entire school so I’m taking three sessions of the kids this week.

Choosing the books for that isn’t quite so simple as I thought it would have been. After all, we’ve our own small mountain of Ladybird and Usborne books to pick through. The snag is that our library was chosen with our own little guys in mind and in practice it doesn’t seem to fit the bill terribly well in a “reading for a group” context. For one thing, the Ladybird books are basically all aimed at P1 and earlier or at least the collection that we have are. The Usborne books would be great for James’ class but the stories in them are just too long for the time slot we’ve been allocated. Great if it was an ongoing thing but not so good for just one 45 minute session.

In many ways it does seem a shame that it’s only a one-off opportunity to do the reading. OK, it would probably end up being something of a chore if it was every week but it also doesn’t seem so good that the kids are all seeing schooling as an entirely female affair. That affects us in the homework too as they often prefer Wendy to do it with them which I imagine is at least partly down to the exclusively female teaching staff that they encounter.

Anyway, by the time you read this I should be well into my first reading session.

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Now that I’ve sort-of decided on what courses I’ll be doing over the next couple of years it’s more or less a matter of waiting ’til the registration period opens and signing up.

Of course, it’s not quite as perfect as that given the OU change the courses on offer each year so if you’ve a reasonable list of courses you’d like to do chances are that there will be at least one change in the running order each year. Complicating things even more is that they’re gradually moving from a February to October cycle to an October to June one which means that if you’re planning more than a year or two in advance, you’re going to have to make some changes. This year there’s also the matter of them doing away with the named science degrees so me and many others are rethinking the sequence of courses that they’re doing with a view to hitting their named degree while it’s still available.

Thus far, I’ve been lucky this year in that there’s been no change in The physical world (S207) which starts as planned in October. However, there is the option for me to accelerate my progress with the physics degree my slotting in Using mathematics (MST121) next January. That would mean that I’d be overlapping one of the major courses (S207) with what should be the relatively easy (for me) MST121. That does beg the question: why do MST121 at all if it’s going to be so easy? Well, thanks to the regulations for the physics degree I need to either do that or something like the introductory science course (looks interesting but gives me 30 points more than I need) or a technology course (also interesting). In principle, MST121 seems to be the most useful of the trio of options.

It’s usually not necessary to enrol incredibly early for the OU courses but given the number of people who admit to intending accelerating the progress on their science degrees I suspect it could be prudent to enrol somewhat earlier than usual this year. That will certainly be the case for the summer schools which are in their last run in 2011 though enrolment for them doesn’t open ’til mid-October.

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Due to a peculiar combination of circumstances, I find myself doing four courses simultaneously at the moment which doesn’t seem like an overly good idea on the face of it.

However, whilst I’m now at the “worst” of it with three assignments due over a two week period about a month from now, it doesn’t seem that bad in practice. That’s down to planning (or “panicking early” as some would say) in that I’m running more than a month ahead with all but one of the course texts and have, in principle, a couple of weeks slack to play with if need be.

What’s taking a surprising amount of time is the cardiology course which, as a level one 15 point course, should be taking the least. The final assignment for that looks like it’ll take getting on for twice the time that the comparable assignments in the two level two 30 point courses will take. That’s not so surprising with hindsight in some ways though: 15 point courses aren’t long 10 pointers but 30 point courses done over half the time which in turn means that I’m effectively doing 100 points worth of courses right now.

Still, one of the four finishes next month and another the month afterwards so I’ll be back to a normal workload for a while.

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