Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

Although we’ve been at the Kip McGrath for a couple of months now, we’ve still not really gotten into the different way of operating it as a system.

So, for example when we found that one of the little guys was racing through a particular section of the homework we were thinking that they’d just up the number of sheets handed out which was the Kumon way of dealing with an easy section. However, in Kip McGrath it triggered a rethink about how best to deal with the issue for James.

What’s happening is that we’re trying him out for a couple of weeks on the spelling sheets a couple of levels above what he’s been doing and, for a week or two, been getting very bored with. Also, she’s had a run-through of a reading comprehension exercise with him with a view to maybe moving him on to that. She’s also starting to up the ante with the maths. Altogether, it’s a change that makes it more interesting for him which in turn should help his progress.

Interestingly, the course was basically changed to suit James rather than requiring him to plough on with work that he was finding boring. There’s also none of the sense of having to work outside the system as happened early on with James in Kumon as the Kip McGrath approach seems more aimed at getting the learning process working through whatever means are required and not getting too hung up on rigidly following “the system” as Kumon did.

When you do several courses at a time you sometimes get a bit of a logjam of assignments. On the whole, it’s generally not so bad as you know quite a bit ahead of time when the assignments are coming up but that doesn’t stop it feeling like quite a busy period when you’ve a series of consecutive deadlines as I do now.

Coming up first is the world archaeology assignment (A251) due on December 3rd so I’m aiming to get that one completed this week. Following close behind that is the CMA for the web applications course (TT280) although I nearly completed that before breakfast on the day it arrived so I will probably finish it off and submit it over the weekend. After that it’s the final assignment for that course which I want to start on this week. Finally, it’s the completion of the final assignment for the medicines course (SK185) which shouldn’t take long.

In theory after that it’s the assignment for the microbes course (S171) but the final date for that is in April so I’m just doing that course as and when I get a few minutes. So far, I’m about 1/4 through it which means it must be nearly time to start the assignment (for short courses you can generally do the assignment as you work through the book).

When the school that our little guys go to was built it had a street running alongside the school wall so when the number of cars bringing kids increased, it was easy for the kids to get dropped off at the school gate and then go down that street.

Times have moved on somewhat since then though. That street and the one parallel to it where my granny lived have been demolished and replaced with a new housing development. Unfortunately, one of the aspects of the new development is that it’s built more in a courtyard style so neither of those two streets exist and instead there remains only the original street leading down to the school entrance which now is effectively a cul-de-sac.

Net effect? You’d have thought that it would have been obvious to the designers of the new development that creating a cul-de-sac where there previously was a way out was going to create problems and so it has. Every morning and afternoon that street is jammed with traffic going down to the end and attempting to turn.

What’s now happened is that the police have been called in to ensure that the school entrance isn’t blocked with cars and that nobody is parking over the new driveways. What should have happened is that the original exit street should have been preserved.

It’s about to get worse though as there are a couple of new housing developments just adjacent to that cul-de-sac and they’re all coming with little lay-bys for the residents. Naturally, they consider the lay-bys as theirs and don’t want the parents parking in them. The snag is that by the time those developments are complete that will leave nowhere to park at all for anyone but the residents. Somehow I suspect that’s going to cause major friction in the years to come.

One of the least well promoted things in the OU is that we’re eligible to apply for the student card issued by the NUS.

At first sight, forking out £10 or so for the card doesn’t seem like a great plan but what makes it worthwhile is that as well as being a student ID card this card also gives you lots of discounts too. So many in fact that I usually find that it’s paid for itself within the first month or two.

On the whole, the discounts are from companies who you’d expect to have a significant number of student customers which means that many of them aren’t of major interest to the mainly mature students from the OU. So, for instance, I don’t see myself ever using FlatMatch. On tbe other hand, I save about £5 a month on my Fitness First membership and Wendy regularly gets 10% or 20% discount from Peacocks and New Look plus there’s the useful 5% off Amazon and free delivery from £5 too.

If you’re not sure whether it’s worth it for you, you can have a look at the discounts on their site first.

Separate from this, but potentially even more valuable are the student discounts available for Microsoft products (up to 100%!).

ED209 is a really big course to revise from and to pass so any help in condensing that revision is always useful as there’s an awful lot of pages in the course books. To that end, I’ve collected together all the various posts and resources relating to it right here.

Before you start there’s the matter of choosing the seen question topic. If you want a head start on this, it’s basically the same question every year and is something along the lines of “how does the theory support your chosen area”. It’s best to treat this as TMA7. In case you were wondering, yes, the question on the exam is exactly the same as the one that they give you in April/May.

Since it is such a large course, it’s best sitting back and deciding on what to revise before starting the revision. Although it’s based around the 2009 exam, that article goes over how to select what you should revise.

In 2009, those revision topics were Early cognitive development, Temperament and development, and First relationships from book 1, Gender identity, National identity, and Young consumers from book 2, Early category representation, First words, Development of children’s understanding of grammar, Executive functions, and Theory of mind from book 3.  All of these are collected in the PDF file. If that’s not enough for you, Tim has an excellent series of notes covering every chapter in book 1 to book 3; not quite so organised but with some useful gems is the information here. For book 4 you’ll need to get the notes from Erica Cox as Tim and myself thought that it would be asking for trouble to publish notes on our own topic.

Once you’ve all that done, there’s some exam preparation to be done right down to the final 24 hours when you should definitely look over your TMAs as they can come up in the exam (and did in 2009). There is a LOT of writing to be done during the exam so get yourself a decent pen.

There are two different revision weekends run for the course. These are by Erica Cox and the OU Psychological Society. I gather that Erica’s are more inspirational, the OUPS ones are more hard work. I didn’t go to either on the basis that the time would be better spent actually doing the revision rather than going to a course about doing it but if I were choosing I think I’d get Erica’s notes and go to the OUPS weekend on the basis that this would get the best of both.

Finally, for your perusal there’s the post-mortem. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the analysis of the 2009 results is that seven people didn’t answer the seen question. Worth noting too is that the large number of people leaving in the first hour or so almost certainly represent the 10% who fail the exam ie if you’re still sitting there at the end of the three hours, chances are that you’ve passed.

I was going to say “good luck” at this point but you shouldn’t need it if you use all the resources above. If you come across anything else that’s useful, let me know and I’ll mention it here.