Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

One of the most unexpected pieces of news that we received was that John was behind target with his reading and that therefore he’s been recommended for the Special Educational Needs section.

I say unexpected because John has gone from a standing start last September to reading quite well books that are notionally in the P2 age range when he’s actually one of the youngest in the P1 class. Not only that but reading homework that was supposed to take anything up to 20 minutes was gone through pretty much as fast as he could turn the pages.

What’s actually happened is that he’s one of the few kids in the class who hadn’t gone to nursery school so couldn’t read before he started school. We did have a go at teaching him to read but found out that we were totally rubbish at it but in practice he was starting to teach himself to read by way of his little computer before he started school. That he was able to make a start on teaching himself to read shows that he shouldn’t be falling into the special needs category as it’s obviously much harder to begin to teach yourself to read than it is to be taught to read.

Now you might think that this shows the advantage of going to nursery school but all it shows is that it’s more school than nursery. Thanks to the extra couple of years of being full-time with me and Wendy he’s way ahead of the other kids in just about every other area you could name.

The other thing to note is that the target in school is markedly different from that in the books as it assumes that the kids have been in nursery school for a couple of years. In reality the target shouldn’t be changed: there’s an appropriate level of achievement to be reached at the end of P1 and it shouldn’t be trying to account for differences in the starting point.

Anyway, as a consequence of this we’re getting him going on the Kumon reading programme over the summer which seems quite likely to have him ahead of the target by the end of the summer. As it is, his maths level is somewhere in the P3 level.

Quite how the infant school that our little guys go to have managed these over the last couple of weeks is a mystery.

Whilst the French school DVD production of two years back was seriously impressive (three first prizes at the Strasbourg international film festival no less!), that allowed the teachers lots of retakes. The productions of last week and this were live which is always harder on everyone.

To be fair they weren’t 100% flawless but considering that they’d only 5 and 7 year olds to work with they were darned impressive nonetheless.

Last week it was James and Billy no buzz, this week it was the P1 extravaganza which had an exotic animal theme. Naturally just about all concerned have photos and/or videos to blackmail their youngsters with in years to come.

With massive cuts all around us it’s interesting that the BBC has picked up on a study by the Sutton Trust to the effect that were current student charges (ie for non-OU people) raised from the current £3k to £7k there’d be potentially an 80% drop in students studying.

That would be fine were those universities the only kids on the block but the existence of the OU raises an interesting option. Right now, you can study full-time at the OU for around £1200 to £2000 for most courses and even for law it’s only £4000-odd. Thus even now it’s cheaper than normal universities (for comparable or better quality education too).

Now, although the OU is the biggest university in the UK with around 200,000 students, there are more like 2 million students in the UK at the moment. Somehow, I just can’t see the OU being able to cope with what could potentially be close to ten times the number of students. Oh, over a period of years I’m sure it could manage but not in one fell swoop.

For other universities, “too many” students wouldn’t be a problem as they could simply turn down students once “enough” had been reached. However, the OU lets students sign up for courses online up to a month or two before courses start with, apparently, no student limits being applied. Existing students can even sign up right up to the course start date.

I suspect that it might be prudent to sign up for courses a little earlier than normal this year as any increase in student fees seems likely to result in a swing towards the OU which is going to have to put out the “no vacancies” sign at some point.

For a change, I had quite a decent revision plan worked out for this exam. That’s largely thanks to the advice sent out by the course team a month or two before the exam which enabled quite well targeted revision. That in turn made for a more comfortable exam than it would have been otherwise.

Of course, that’s not to say that the revision was perfect as several of the short questions showed up limitations in this revision strategy in that I’d not covered their topics in sufficient detail to answer them nearly as well as I’d have liked to. Still, overall I think I did quite well on the exam and amazingly well considering that a year ago I’d not done any biology at all.

The problem with an exam is that there’s quite a long period working up to it both in terms of the course time and the more intense revision period just prior to the exam. That leaves me at least all hyped up and it was two full days after the exam before I’d gotten back to normal and back into working on the courses that are still running on for me.

Which has me wondering how long it’ll take me to wind down from the S204 + S320 combo exam in October next year. Still, at least after their exams I’ll have several months of a break.

As it turned out, the last minute revision wasn’t really required with the exception of a brief look at the diagram of the digestion system.

Unexpectedly, the digestion question was pretty much  a repeat of the July 2006 question “Write an essay that describes the process of digestion involved in consuming a cheese and tomato sandwich.” replacing “cheese” with “egg” and adding “absorption”. The endocrine, circulation and stress essays were unexpectedly general and looked easy enough to do.

The data handling was loosely based on a stress experiment although you didn’t need to know anything about stress to do it. Unexpectedly again there was a graph to be drawn which represented 1/3rd of the marks for that question. I think it’s fairly safe to say that most people will get over 20 out of the possible 30 marks for it so in theory even 10 out of 30 for the essay plus a couple of short answer questions would be enough for a pass.

The short questions were all over the place as expected. First off was a hard core chemistry question was seemed not to have been a good start for most people. Nobody seemed to have gotten the circle of Willis one in my group and there was another one which I suspect my mark will be close to zero. Other than those two the rest were quite a reasonable mix and largely answerable from my “27 page” summary although not entirely as it turned out (no mention of the circle of Willis for instance, no mention of the chemistry angle either). There was at least one repeat from previous years (advice to a pregnant friend re smoking to have a smaller size baby and easier birth) and one or two others looked kind of familiar so it’s definitely worthwhile looking at past papers for this one.

Strategy-wise I took a brief look at the essay questions first before taking a run through all of the short questions and scribbling out a few keywords that struck me. That worked out really well as I managed to answer a few more of the short questions than I had originally expected to be able to answer as a couple of things came to me whilst I was doing the essay and data handling question. It also gave me a lot of time to do the short question as the essay only took 45 minutes or so and the data handling was about the same.

Quite oddly I felt very comfortable with this exam which is certainly a major change from being all stressed out (as was everyone) with last years Child Development course. Marks-wise I have a pessimistic estimate of 60 but didn’t have enough time to do my optimistic estimate this time (the last few of the short questions took lots of thinking time).