Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Chemistry’ Category

Just one more full day of revision to go and the exam will be upon me.

The chemistry course has been something of an interesting journey for me. It began just a week or so after the S204 (biology) exam so the first few weeks went in a bit of a blur as I recovered from that. The next few months ran alongside a full-time computer course which ate up a lot of the time that ordinarily would have been available for study and then it was on to the new job which ate up even more time. Not a good recipe for great performance on the course and the marks tracked the availability of time for the course pretty well ie not great after the first assignment. Funnily enough, now that I’ve had a fairly good run at the revision, I feel reasonably confident about the exam (the confidence could dissipate quite quickly on Tuesday morning though!).

I began the revision a few weeks ago based on the “bookmarks” and chapter summaries that the course team very helpfully pulled out. Together those run to 152 pages which is fairly comparable with the amount on S204 if you take into account the different font size. The information density is so high that it takes ages to read through and I wish I’d started a few weeks earlier as my target of a book’s worth per day made for a very hard slog at times.

Stage two was based around the past papers and two tutorials relating to those. Whilst in S204 there were chunks of the books classed as optional, in S205 the options are enshrined on the paper itself. As usual, the short questions are from the entire course but since it’s 8 from 12 you can effectively omit one or possibly two books and still do quite well. I find that in practice I’m able to pick 6 to 8 questions that I can do very well from each of the past papers which equates to around 25% to 30% of the overall marks for the paper ie in principle I should almost have passed just on the short questions.

The longer questions are divided up into three sections and you pick 1 from 3 in each of those sections. The first section seems the easiest with substitution/elimination and retrosynthetic analysis that seem fairly doable in each of the papers. The second section has kinetics and spectroscopy which generally seem quite doable alongside orbitals and bonding which don’t so a reasonable selection again. The final section seems the most difficult potentially with a VSEPR question that can be all over the place, a Born-Haber cycle that’s mostly doable and what could very much be a nightmare book 9 question. Still, hopefully with 25% in the bank from the short questions I won’t need a massive amount from the longer ones to achieve a pass.

I’m planning on going over my one page of notes tomorrow and perhaps to look in more detail at the crystals book and, of course, there’s the exam bag to be packed.

This year the bag will be a lot more packed than usual. There’s the normal pens, pencil, spare pen and pencil, ruler, calculator, spare calculator (yes, I know, paranoid), wine gums (I’m expecting a number of “wine gum moments” for this exam), Lucozade and passport (you need photo ID for the exam). To that are added the molecular model kit (although I’ve yet to see a question that required it) and the data book. Since I have them from the S204 exam, I’ll likely take along the coloured pencils and drawing kit: I’m sure that some day I’ll do an exam where I’ll use them.

As with the S204 exam, there’s no rest period afterwards as I’ve to get the CMAs for both the residentials done before the end of the month and get back into the SD329 reading as there’s an assignment for it due just after I get back from the residentials.

The last couple of months have proved to be a very hectic time indeed.

The web design course finished at the end of February and turned out to be far more helpful than I could have imagined. What it let me do was to implement a massive upgrade to the inns sites and alongside that to similarly improve the SEO. Both tasks are still ongoing but only because the initial upgrade made it a whole lot easier to implement subsequent improvements. That in turn has made it viable to really ramp up the promotion of the sites and we’re pulling in new additions pretty much as fast as we can cope with them.

Following on from that course there’s a placement with a web company. In my case, it turned out to be what was seemingly the perfect job for me, aside from the salary. Unfortunately in many ways a full-time job came up just a couple of weeks after I started there so I was off to that at the start of April. Not nearly such an inspiring job but the pay is welcome.

In between the two we managed to finally get around to our major moving exercise from France. Somehow our estimate of half a Luton van of stuff (which we took from the photos taken when we first arrived in France) was way off and not only did we have pretty much a full Luton van but also a very packed car and still need a final car-run to clear out what we had to leave behind.

The job is causing a major readjustment for us all. For John, it’s the first time in his life that Daddy hasn’t been around all day every day for him. James is nearly as bad as he was only two when we moved to France. It’s an adjustment for Wendy too as I’m not around to look after the kids. And for me, notably in the study time which just ain’t there which is going to make the next few months very difficult indeed as the study doesn’t drop down to part-time until September.

To easy us in a little, I’ve taken the Easter week off which, hopefully, will give me a chance to catch up on some things.

I’ve managed to pile in a massive amount of stuff into the first couple of months of the year, hence lack of updates on the blog.

To begin with, the Chemistry course assignments have proved to be both more time consuming and less rewarding than expected. That’s had be starting to rethink the possibility of future chemistry courses. Essentially, I’m shelving them for the moment apart from the residential that’s already booked. That in turn frees up a chunk of time in the coming year so I might do the bio/psych course in October.

The Autism course is barely noticeable in terms of time required. Just this evening I finished the final iCMA with a 100% score in under 10 minutes and without even glancing at the book. All being well the EMA will be equally easy.

I thought I was behind with the signals & perception course but it turns out that I was running at a 60 point rate for a 30 point course so I’m well ahead of the official timetable.

The web design course being fairly full-time has forced me to rejig the times that I do the OU courses and it’s just as well that the workload this year was lower than last year or I’d have had to drop something I think.

The first fruits of the web design course are a radical update of the listings sites producing a major improvement in the look and feel of OurBedAndBreakfasts.com, OurHolidayRentalHomes.com and WholeEarthGuide.com . I’m hoping to double the number of properties listed over the course of the coming 18 months or so and as step one of that I’ve a bunch of adwords campaigns running. Upcoming tasks include refining the adwords campaigns, getting the B&B marketing guide assembled into book form and increasing the coverage of the Whole Earth guide which’ll keep me busy for the next month or two I expect.

After getting over the mountain that was the S204 exam, I feel that I’ve been really getting into the chemistry course over the past month or so.

I’ve the third assignment away this morning and it’s the first one that I feel reasonably confident about (though ’til the results come back it could easily be false optimism). Interestingly the biology course is proving increasingly useful as the course moves more into proper chemistry or rather moves away from the largely theoretical side of things and into dealing with how various chemicals react together.

One problem continues to dog progress and that’s that chemistry doesn’t fit easily into the computer age. Actually doing the assignments doesn’t take overly long for the most part but getting the various symbols and diagrams onto the computer eats up the time. To begin with you need to pick up an entirely different font from the normal ones to even be able to type the symbols required and, of course, those symbols aren’t on the keyboard so every one needs to be inserted as a special symbol. The diagrams themselves are equally easy on paper but need a range of software to prepare them for the computer. Even what would appear to be a simple graph can’t be done with normal spreadsheet software because you need to put sub and superscripts on the titles and axes labels.

Still, the plus point of that is that the course team need to make the assignments a little easier to do than they might do otherwise although with the large potential for a few errors to creep in between paper and computer screen, the marks haven’t (yet) reflected that slightly easier aspect.

Also this morning was the third iCMA for the autism course. As usual, it was four questions that could be answered by finding and reading a few paragraphs of the book for each one. Another 100% mark for me which means that I have passed the continuous assessment part of the course already with two more iCMAs left which, for me, are now effectively optional.

In comparison to the chemistry, the autism course is very much a stop-start affair. It’s around one iCMA per month covering one or two chapters of the book and with each chapter only taking a couple of hours to read it’s working out at two or three hours per month to do the course (compared to the official 8 hours a week). The net effect of that is that I generally do an iCMA then read the chapter(s) for the next one and then there’s nothing to do for three weeks. The problems with that approach are that by the time the next iCMA comes around, I’ve to revise the relevant chapter(s) before doing the questions and that overall it’s a very annoying way to progress through the course.

I’ve been plugging away with biology for a couple of years now. Starting from scratch, biology was seriously difficult at the start but a couple of years down the line I’m thinking like a biologist.

Thus, despite having done quite a lot of chemistry a long time ago, it was a bit of a jolt to restart the chemistry straight after the biology exam. That said, the resulting mark was slightly higher than the biology marks.

What’s quite noticeable is that I’m getting back into the swing of the chemistry. The texts are a lot easier going than the biology ones were, so much so that after just over six weeks into a seven month course, I’m over half-way through the books. It’s a slightly different story with the assignments which are taking ages to do although to be fair most of that is down to the time it takes to draw the various molecules and to get the relevant characters picked out of the chemistry font.

Next up is an iCMA which I hate as even the tiniest mistake is a problem and you can’t even print out the questions beforehand.

Quite what progress will be like when the biology/chemistry/psychology course that’s Signals and Perception starts up next month is another matter, of course.