Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

Looking at course reviews before you’ve started a course seems to be completely different to looking at them once you’ve started on the same course sometimes.

Take the astronomy course that I’m doing at the moment. The key words in the reviews of it could be summed up as “fascinating” and “maths”. Critically, none of them use “challenging” (read: “very difficult”).

Reading those reviews a year ago, the course sounded quite interesting to me. The maths didn’t bother me as I’ve done quite a bit before this although I did slip in the Maths for Science (S151) course just in case my very rusty university maths needed a bit of oiling. So, in effect, it read as a fascinating course overall.

Over half-way through it has a different feel to me. There is quite a lot of maths in it or at least in the cosmology half of the course and I’d say that a glance at that section in advance would put off many a prospective student of the course. However, what I’d not allowed for was the sheer amount of time that it would take up. The course materials are, as usual, very readable but the time needed to do the assignments is far, far beyond anything that I’ve ever needed to take doing an assignment before. Quite why that should be, I’m not quite sure but it seems to be a combination of the time taken to type up all the symbols used (which is substantial, even on a short answer) and the amount of leafing back and forth to find out various facts required to answer the questions. Overall, it seems to equate to something like double or more the amount of time needed for any previous assignments that I’ve done at this level.

I’d also question the “fascinating” aspect that many mention in their comments. Yes, there are lots of pretty pictures and going through the theories as to how the various objects depicted got to be that way is interesting at the start but somehow the long list of theories that seem to build up like a freight train seems to get tedious all too often. So much so that it has me questioning whether I should carry on with physics at all. Yes, it’s that bad sometimes. Oddly, biology which seems to have just as many theories knocking around doesn’t ever seem to get to that building freight train stage and that’s puzzling.

Anyway, must get back to the assignment now… for reasons which escape me, I “knew” that the return date was May 19th but it’s actually May 14th so I need to get a move on!

Last year in a fit of enthusiasm I managed to sign up for both my first ever biology course and its sort-of associated residential.

As expected, the human biology course was both heavy going parts and thoroughly interesting right through. Having said that, it’s with some trepidation that I approach the revision for the upcoming exam in June: there’s a LOT of revision to be done in what seems to be an awfully short amount of time.

However, it’s now into the initial stages of the sort-of associated residential. I say sort-of because it’s associated with three separate courses (S204, SK277 and SD226) of which I’ve only done one so far and had intended to be in the midst of another one as I write this though I’ll not be doing it for another year or perhaps two on the current plans. The net effect of that is that I need to go over more of the background material than is ideal but, so far, that seems remarkably doable as has all of the biology so far.

Slightly unusually, the website is open before the paper versions of the documents have arrived which has let me get an initial look at them. There’s not really that much: the usual course-team letter, the introductory booklet and a course guide which also contains the background science required of the course. That last one is so comprehensive that I’d say it would be possible to come to this course without having done any of the three related biology courses though obviously you’d need to work that much harder if you did that.

Assessment-wise, it seems easy enough from this vantage point with the usual attendance requirement, marks on two mid-week presentations and a short (1000 word) write-up after the course which collectively seem very doable at this point. Total time required is supposed to be 10 hours going over the preparatory information, the week itself and about 10 hours doing the write-up following the course.

Because of the mix of associated courses, there’s a corresponding mix of experiments to be done over the week. They’re split into three separate themes: regulation and control (aimed at the human biology people), energy (aimed more generally at animals I think but I’ve not read that yet) and plants and carbon dioxide (obviously aimed at plants). All look to be very interesting at this point and that’s a view that seems to be reflected in all the course comments from previous students.

The only problem is that this course plus the human biology one are too darned interesting! That’s created a real dilemma for me in that I was originally intending to be doing a physics degree and, so far, I’m finding the biology both fascinating (much more so than the physics at this point) and a whole lot more doable than I had ever imagined it would be. That fascinating+doable combo has me thinking that perhaps I should jump ship and do the biology degree now. Snag is that with the withdrawal of the named science degrees by the OU, a choice to do that at this point basically rules out the possibility of doing a physics degree later on (though the courses would potentially remain available).

All being well, I’ll be off to Mount Stewart with the school tomorrow though I’ll not know for sure about it ’til later today.

The problem is that two of the normal class helpers are stranded thanks to the grounding of the planes but then they’re opening up the airways again later today, or at least in some areas they are. Thus, I don’t know if they’ll be back today. It’ll really mess up James if I’m not there though as he’s really set on having either me or Wendy along with him.

One other downside is that the forecast isn’t looking too good for Wednesday at the moment and Mount Stewart doesn’t seem like a great place to be if it’s raining.

We’ve our two little guys enrolled in the Kumon programmes but for different reasons.

Thanks to the disaster that’s French education for the non-French, James kicked off in school here well behind where he should have been. Therefore we enrolled him with a view to catching up with where he should have been at this point just under a year ago. John started school here last September and quickly found it boring so his enrolment in the maths programme was to keep him interested in learning.

After just under a year James has moved through four levels and should be around where he should be in school early next year and seems to be gradually picking up the pace with the Kumon. John starting from the proper level raced through four levels in under four months and shows no sign of slowing that pace so may manage six or seven levels over the 12 months. In fact, both are doing so well that they’re both getting awards for their progress next month.

Ordinarily, the rate of progress is supposed to be around 4 levels in the first year and a couple per year after that which would get you from scratch to calculus in about 10 years and the equivalent in the English programme. However, I suspect that’s a very biased statistic if our Kumon centre is anything to go by basically because a significant number of students have non-native English speaking parents thus it’s being used by them to aid school work (as we’re doing with James) rather than to get the kids ahead. Thus, I’m expecting that the J&J progress rate will be more like 6 or 7 levels in year one and 3 or 4 after that (it obviously gets more difficult when your kids are well ahead of their school work, hence the slowing down) which, in principle, would take John from scratch to calculus over about five or six years.

If they achieve anything like that I guess there’ll be issues by the time they leave primary school but I’m sure it’s better to err on the side of them being too far ahead of their school work than take a chance on them falling behind.

Incidently, for those considering the Kumon programmes or just wanting a preview of what’s coming up, the Loggers Run Kumon centre have a great little website with examples of the sheets and loads more.

I’d both the astronomy and human biology assignments back in the same post yesterday.

As it’s the first of the astronomy assignments I’d really no idea what to expect. It’s been a long, long time since I did any kind of physics course so I wasn’t quite sure how best to approach it all. What I did was take on board the comments from the previous biology assignments which certainly seemed to have helped some in that the mark came out at 79% which is a nice start for sure.

Funnily enough, the biology weighed in at 74% though I suppose a slightly lower mark isn’t a great surprise in that it was the last TMA I did after some four weeks solid of doing them so I was a bit worn out with them all.

What was interesting was that the astronomy assignment was much more difficult to do than the biology ones have been. Since I have quite a background in physics/astronomy I was expecting that the astronomy assignments would be fairly easy going in comparison to the biology ones yet, to date, the reverse has been the case. Oddly, I’m finding the biology course much more interesting to do as well.

Since there’s only one biology assignment to be done the assessment calculator is at it’s most interesting in respect of “substitution” scores. It turns out that even if I don’t do that final one I would pick up 56% overall on the assignments which isn’t bad although doing the final assignment should raise that to something in the 70s. As always, I still wonder how “real” the assignment marks are at this point ie will my exam mark reflect the marks I’ve received in the assignments? In recent years, the exam mark has ended up within a few percent of the TMA average (previously there used to be quite a difference) so that’s reassuring though this’ll be the first science exam I’ve done for many years.