Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

The selection process for secondary (or post-primary as they call it) schools in Northern Ireland can be quite a stressful one.

To begin with there are essentially seven types of school to choose from. First, there’s the state school system (largely Protestant) and the Catholic school system (largely, but not exclusively, Catholic), both of which come in high school and grammar school varieties. Then there are the integrated schools which come in high school, grammar school and mixed varieties. Finally, there are a few private or semi-private schools which are mainly a mix of grammar and non-selective with fees ranging from around £500 to £2500 depending on the school and whether you consider “voluntary” contributions to actually be mandatory (which, largely, they are).

In reality, the number of schools is somewhat thinned out due to geography unless you want to live a really complicated life. Thus, in our case, there are within sensible striking distance two non-selective state schools, two state grammar schools, two Catholic grammar schools, two integrated schools and three private/semi-private schools. That’s rather a lot to attempt to visit and in practice we ended up going to see nine of them which is still quite a lot and so we ended up spreading the visits over two years. The two we didn’t bother with were knocked out for us as, frankly, they are rubbish schools and everyone knows that.

Of those that we did visit, some were very easy to eliminate from consideration as we (ie us and the little guy) just didn’t find them appealing. Surprisingly, this included Inst (RBAI) which, on the face of it, seems an excellent school but we just didn’t particularly like it. That was also the case with Wellington though with that we were also none too impressed with the knowledge of the pupils on the open day. Ashfield bit the dust as it has an extremely narrow range of subjects – seemingly only those that are absolutely essential (eg one foreign language because they’re required to teach one).

Which left us with six and there’s only room for five on the form. In practice, you have to put one or two non-selective schools on the list in case the transfer test results don’t come out as you’d hoped but that’s not necessarily so easy a thing to do as the normal default school in our case would be Ashfield which states that you will only get accepted if you put them first or second on the form and this year it needed to be first as they appear to have had a bit of a run of applications.

Anyway, because of the need to put at least one non-selective school on the list, we had to drop Methody which was really nice and would have been third or fourth on our list otherwise. It’s a bit further down largely down to the logistics of getting the little guy there in the mornings and it would have been higher otherwise.

First place went to my old school simply because of that. My parents didn’t have the chance to do the open day experience that we did and I’m not sure that I’d have picked it out of the range of schools that we’ve seen. So it worked out quite well that he didn’t get that but rather the second on the list which in reality was our first choice. We’d have been equally pleased with our third choice which was a thoroughly impressive school full of very knowledgeable pupils on the open day. Fourth choice was the integrated Lagan College which looks like it will one day become one of the great schools but it’s not quite there yet (it’s pretty good at the moment). We could have lived with our fifth choice, Priory College, but wouldn’t have been over the moon with it.

One thing that always amazes me is that parents put down schools that they don’t like at all. This year is no exception if the Facebook comments of some pupils are anything to go by and I think a lot of tears have been shed on Saturday when the school selection letters turned up because of that. Why on earth would anyone put down a school that they know their child will hate? The applications to failing schools also confuse me – why do people apply to schools that are failing so badly that their closure is even announced in the information booklet that all parents get? The zero ambition of some parents is also sad with some really bright kids not getting to even try for a grammar school and instead ending up in also-ran schools when they could have done so much better.

What’s also sad, is how little thought some parents put into choosing which schools they put on their list. Many will only know of the school that they went to but these days there’s heaps of information about schools and they all have open nights. We spent ages pouring over the booklets that are sent out to P7 parents (and you can either download them or ask the primary school for them in P6 as we did). Our “short” list of nine took us two years to get through and we went to our favoured schools at least twice each. Yes, it did take a lot of time and effort but it’s going to be the school that James will be in for the next seven years and one that’ll make a big difference in his future.

This is around the mid-point of the infectious disease (SK320) course so it seems a good time to do a review of the course so far.

It’s one of the new-style online courses so there are no books with it, or rather there are are no formally printed and bound books. What you get is a DVD about a month ahead of the course start which contains PDFs of all the texts from the course, which you can download in PDF, ePub and Word formats when the course officially starts in February. The videos embedded in the ePub files are also recorded on the DVD but as separate FLV and MP4 files.

When it gets going, there are quite a number of online tutorials (none face to face) with getting on for one a week initially. All reasonably short at one hour and easy enough to follow. Recordings of these are made available as MP4 with the presentations usually as PDFs but sometimes as Powerpoint files as well. You can order a printed copy of the course materials which runs to around 1400 A4 pages and costs about £110 for colour.

Block 1 starts off very easy but quickly gets into a range of different diseases with block 2 looking at how the immune system deals with them and block 3 considering public health aspects. There seems to be a massive amount of different processes to learn but I’ve not started the revision yet.

Assessment is via four TMAs, 2 iCMAs and an exam. As is usual these days, you just need to pass the assignments and your grade is solely dependent on the exam. The first TMA is a totally trivial one that most people could expect to get close to 100% with, the next two are structured like the exam with the final one being a research based topic. As usual, the iCMAs seem to be very detailed and you need to refer to the texts to answer the questions; they count for 12% and 10% respectively.

It’s quite an interesting course to follow along, so far anyway, but sometimes gets into long stretches of pathways as S377 did.

At one stage I was running nearly 6 weeks ahead of the course so it’s an easy one to get ahead with but equally it’s easy to drop behind with as the units are very variable in length so it’s difficult to judge just how much reading you have to do.

This is a peculiar little course in many ways being a mix of history and maths, but interesting throughout.

It’s based around the TV series The Story of Maths that the BBC put out a few years ago along with the accompanying book. Both these are tied together with the course guide that’s entirely online these days. Well, it calls itself a course guide but in reality it is the maths portion of the course as it goes through the detail of the various mathematical techniques from counting in ancient Egypt to the developments in the late 20th century. The explanations begin quite detailed but as it approaches the end of the 20th century, the detail drops away in line with the increasing complexity and so it’s more of a story of arithmetic rather than a complete story of maths.

The TV series itself becomes a little peculiar towards the end too. It starts off by visiting the various spots where the mathematical techniques were developed so they’re off to Egypt and Babylon in the early segments but carrying that approach on through to late 20th century maths means that it ends up going to visit the childhood homes of various mathematicians and has one very strange segment where the presenter tries to track down a particularly reclusive Russian mathematician. Some of the maths is touched on but you’d need either the course guide or the book to follow it and the series is more to set the historical background.

The assessment of the maths is via two online multiple choice assignments which have questions ranging from Egyptian counting through to questions covering parts of more recent mathematics. Although there are a few multiple choice historical questions in the online quizzes, the main assessment of the history is via two short essays written at the end of the course.

The book seems to be mainly there as support for the historical side of things and in particular for the essays at the end of the course so I’ve not used that yet as it’s been the maths that I’ve been working on mainly.

Quite a nice little course that neatly integrates the maths and the history so it’s a shame that this is another one of the Open University courses that’s dying this year.

Finishing the Life Sciences degree means that I’ve a number of quite different options at this point. To add flexibility to my future plans, first off I’m going to top-up my “miscellaneous interesting courses” degree to the point where I can claim it and thereby avoid losing the points should I not get to fully complete it by 2019. I have several options for doing this which basically involve doing one course in October 2014 and another in 2015. At the moment, I’m planning on October E102 Introduction to childhood studies and child psychology, the new 60 pointer that would restart my psychology degree that’s been on hold since I got going with the life sciences. For the 2015 slot, there’s really only S345 Chemical change and environmental applications as it fills the 20 point hole that stops me from claiming the degree.

As a side-line, I’m also planning on gradually increasing the number of courses within the miscellaneous degree with November S283 Planetary science and the search for life,  the second 30 pointer for my Certificate in Astronomy and Planetary Science, being the top of my short list, though I have several 10 and 15 pointers in my sights too, notably S155 Scientific Investigations (on its final run this year) and D171 Counselling. Further down the road is A326 Empires: 1492-1975, the 60 point follow-on from the World Archaeology course that I did a few years back and A200 Medieval to modern history with the Creative Arts degree from the OU’s sister university, the Open College of the Arts remaining in my thoughts.

That done, the following year I’d really like to get going on the masters where I’m looking at:

• Molecular Biology and Biotechnology at Queen’s, one year full-time or two part-time;
• Structural Molecular Biology at Birkbeck, two or three years distance learning;
• Molecular Biology at Staffordshire, two years distance learning but with two summer schools; or
• Medicinal Chemistry with the OU, three or four years distance learning

The “only” problem with the masters is that I’ve not, yet, worked out how to fit it in with real-life.

I generally take a break from the studying on Saturdays so with the bad weather today it was a bit of a catch-up day or rather more of a getting ahead day in practice.

As I’ve been spacing out the Infectious Disease assignment over the last couple of weeks, there’s only a tiny bit of that still to do. Well, in principle it’s a tiny bit but as it’s a research question it’s hard to say how long it will actually take. It’s to be in later this week so I’m going to try and get that completed this evening.

I’m well through the computer marked assignment for the course too. It’s a bit of a pain as they’ve several free format answers and, going by the forum, it’s marking many correct answers wrong so they may have to zero weight the affected questions.

I’m miles ahead with the history of maths course and got even further ahead today. It’s a peculiar mix of history and maths with the maths largely being in the books whilst the history bit is mainly in the videos. The computer marked questions are almost all based on the maths and cover a wide range from Egyptian counting through Newton and on to late 20th century maths. As it’s only a 10 point level 1 course everything is naturally at a fairly low level but I’m finding that working through such a vast time span is surprisingly interesting. The videos (the Story of Maths TV series) are a bit peculiar towards the end with the presenter turning up at the childhood homes of various mathematicians for no particularly good reason and skating over the maths along the way. That said, the combination of the videos for the story and the books for the maths works quite well and it’s a shame that they hadn’t applied a similar combination in other subjects.