Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

Not so long ago you were encouraged to put as much as you could into checked luggage so that the passenger area of the plane wasn’t cluttered with a whole heap of a little (often a lot) too large carry-on luggage.

Of course, it’s completely different now and they want you to do without checked luggage altogether if you can. Despite their normally over the top approach to charging even Ryanair has raised the carry-on allowances to a notional 10kg  (Ryanair say “It should weigh no more than 10kg”). In practical terms, so long as you go for online check-in, there really isn’t a limit so long as you can actually carry it onto the plane and so long as it’s not too far off the 55x40x20 size.

Even the liquid limits don’t seem overly severe so long as you don’t try to bring drinks. Normal sized tubes of toothpaste might look big but they’re no more than the 100ml limit. You can even bring on drinks so long as you buy them after you’ve passed through security thus avoiding the ridiculous prices on the plane (though don’t be drinking too much on Ryanair as it’s £1 for the toilet).

Laughably these days you’re still not allowed to take “magnetised materials” on-board although that’s a rule that has been totally impractical to enforce since credit cards came on the scene not to mention the magnetic stripe on many tickets. I wonder when it’ll occur to IATA to revise this?

What is a real pain is getting everything into the one bag. As you read this I’ll be struggling to get a weeks worth of clothes plus assorted items for my OU summer school into a bag: white coat, big lump of a course book, computer, etc. I’m sure that there’s room for a “how to pack a carry-on bag” course!

Well, perhaps not all of them but by the sound of it the food in Nottingham University is absolutely dreadful. So bad in fact, that people who have been there before are planning on either doing their own cooking or living on sandwiches and whatnot sold by one of the shops in the students union.

However, there is another option which is the staff canteen, at least at lunchtime. In the evenings it sounds very much like DIY is the way to go so I’ll be doing a little stocking up on Saturday afternoon before the course starts (there’s not a whole lot of time to do that once it gets underway).

Oh well, at least the view from the halls of residence is quite good.

As expected, the various posts on the Child Development (ED209) course from last year are once more rising in popularity as the next contingent of students reach the same point (ie blind panic) as me and my co-students were a year ago.

The odd thing about that is that over the course of that year there don’t seem to have been any more ED209 bloggers whereas last year three of us appeared on the scene where none had been before.

Anyway, the net effect of that is that the two ED209 revision blogs (ie mine and Tim’s) started picking up hits on the revision topics as from about a month ago and the number of those hits has been rising each week. Presumably the same thing will happen next year with the addition of Tim’s DD303 notes and my own SK277 notes.

The Kumon tutor is off on holiday for the rest of July so we were given enough of the worksheets to keep us going for the rest of the month and it’s a frightening heap of paper – getting on for an inch and a half of worksheets for each of our little guys.

Actually, it could have been more but we’re running at half the normal number for the harder of the two subjects for each of them at the moment. In theory we’re aiming to move to full speed during August but we’ll see how July pans out. Since we’ve just moved to two subjects for each of them, we’ve not quite established the new working pattern for the worksheets and, of course, it’s the school holidays at the moment so it would be different anyway.

We’re hoping that the sheer mountain of work ahead won’t put them off. In the normal little weekly doses it doesn’t look nearly so great!

At the end of next week I’m off to the biology residential in Nottingham so should be sort-of busy doing stuff in preparation for that and probably in preparation for the things that I’ll not be doing whilst I’m there or rather not here.

However, the unexpectedly easy astronomy assignment has left me somewhat at a loose end. Not entirely mind you as there are a heap of administration type things that there just wasn’t the time to move on with over the last month or so with all the end of school year things to be done. Still, it does mean a slight lull in activity on the OU front.

There’s a fair amount of reading that doesn’t have to be done before the residential but I’ll be aiming to at least skim over it over the next week or so.

At the moment it looks like the hardest pre-course task will be getting everything packed into one carry-on bag under 10kg. Well, under 9kg as they always come back with more stuff from a course than you arrived with. So far, I’ve a white coat, baby computer, calculator and massive lab book that need to be taken which is getting on for half of the baggage allowance!