Foreign Perspectives

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Although I never thought the day would come when I’d be talking of completing my modern languages degree, I find myself on the final course of that at the moment.

That means that after six years I am in the position of looking around for something to do that doesn’t fall under the heading of “modern languages”. Now, whilst I’d like to keep the studies ticking over, I’m not really looking for anything heavy duty at the moment although that really doesn’t narrow down the field of subjects a great deal.

Purely out of lazyness, I’m limiting my searches to the courses that the Open University put out but perhaps “limiting” isn’t quite the word to apply here as the range is pretty staggering (no, this isn’t a commercial for them!).

I’d also like the course to finish before the summer next year as, all being well, I’ll be off to the graduation in September. And, I’d like to do something “different” which basically rules out another language.

At the moment, I’m thinking of:

1. World Archaeology, which covers getting on for 12,000 years over the course of 18 weeks and sounds fascinating but quite hard work and starts in September which is before my current course ends, so provisionally I’ve ruled it out for this year;
2. Engineering the Future, which sounds like a truly fascinating course too. It starts in October and runs to June but there’s an associated residential. Definitely in the running;
3. Rundblick: beginners’ German, starts in November but runs to the following October which is quite long and, of course, is “just” another language which provisionally rules it out;
4. Using Mathematics is a course that I’ll need to do in due course but doesn’t really fire me up at the moment, so it’s provisionally ruled out for this year;
5. Geology, doesn’t start ’til February which means that it runs over the (hoped for) graduation ceremony so provisionally gets ruled out; and
6. Exploring Psychology, starts the week before my final exam but is workable (though I’d like a little break). Unlike the above courses this one is a full credit course ie there’s more work to be done. However, it’s one that’s been on my “to do” list for a while now.

So which, if any, will it be? At the moment, I’d say that the archaeology, engineering and psychology courses are the front runners. Or, of course, I could just take a break

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Funnily enough, just as I figured that it was probably all downhill from here on the English course, I’ve hit a bit of a pothole in the form of a chapter on literature.

Well, not so much literature, but rather the language that Literature (with a capital “L”) uses including various types of poetry and the classics. The amount of stuff that I don’t know about literary techniques could fill a library so this particular chapter is proving to be pretty heavy going for me at the moment.

Fortunately there’s a choice of questions on the exam so I should be able to get by without really knowing a whole lot about the content of this chapter which is just as well.

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Although the English course that I’m doing at the moment has the reputation of being the hardest course in the university, I’m finding that as I go through it I’m picking up speed and seem likely to get to the end of the course something like three months ahead of schedule (which is some going on a nine month course!).

Yet, whilst I’m moving along at a seemingly hectic pace (and, no, I’m not skipping sections to do that), others are saying that they’re falling further and further behind. Why? Funnily enough, it seems to be a result of my history of doing language courses which appear to have covered a good deal of the material before, albeit either in French or Spanish. Most of the others are approaching this English language course with a history of English literature courses behind them which, of course, wouldn’t have covered that type of material.

Whatever it is, I’m now around 75% of the way through the course and planning on taking a week out to do some revision and to complete the next assignment.

What this experience has shown me is that there’s little point in reading about the experiences of others of particular courses in isolation from their prior experience. For example, when I look at the forum for the phychology course that I might be doing next, I see that many people on that are saying that they’re getting behind too. Aside from not knowing what prior experience in the field that they’ve brought to the course, there’s also the bias towards forums being places to air problems as opposed to saying “I’m doing great”.

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