Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

Two weeks from today, I’ll be sitting down to do the SK320 exam which means that I’m well into phase one of the revision.

It’s a bit of a mountain of a course for a 30 pointer. In addition to the 1400 pages of text, there were numerous videos embedded in the course material, references to some massive tomes (e.g. HEAT weighs in at 3000 pages!) and oodles of tutorials.

At the moment, I’ve completed my run through the first two books and am getting into the third book which I should complete by this weekend. At 300 pages, it’s the shortest of the three books and as it’s on public health rather than the science, it’s not quite so heavy going. So, hopefully, I will have a full set of notes in a few days time and then it’s on to phase 2 of the revision.

Phase 2 will be a mix of going over the notes I’ve prepared, the past papers (only two plus the SEP), the FAQ which looks useful and, not to be forgotten, the research question for the final part of the question paper. That research question is a bit of a puzzler at the moment as I’m not sure if I need to research any more information at this point so it’s difficult to say how long it will take; my theory at the moment is that it shouldn’t take more than a day to look over but I plan to take a first run at it as soon as the main notes are completed.

More anon on the revision as I move onto phase 3 in the final couple of days before the exam.

Seeing as I’m restarting the psychology next month, I’ve been keeping my eye out for events in that line. We’re quite well served with them locally and I’ve managed several full-day conferences as well as a number of shorter presentations.

Last week was the occasion for a “Thinking Well” event which is part of the ongoing series of events that the civil service health promotion Well programme runs. This is something of a new departure for them as up to now they’ve generally concentrated on physical health and with relatively short presentations compared to the three hour long one last Friday.

Usually, these work-based mental health programmes concentrate on stress to the exclusion of all else so it was a refreshing change to have one that looked more at one’s own behaviours and the thinking modes of others for a change. Quite an interactive session though fortunately it wasn’t billed as such as that would have almost certainly put people off what was an enjoyable and, I think, useful session.

The two presenters passed the presentation back and forth pretty much seemlessly and used a whole bunch of techniques that they later explained to manipulate a number of people in the room surprisingly successfully. One session at the end designed to show how easily people developed mirrored body language was almost scary in how closely some people dropped into the mirroring with two people in the group almost at the point of appearing as an couple.

As in all psychology models, there were idealised groups into which people were categorised, in this case auditory, visual, kinesthetic and autitory-digital and there was a fair bit of talking around the most effective means of interacting with each of those categories.

Overall, quite an enjoyable little course and one that has elements which may be useful in the future.

Three weeks from today, it’ll be down to the final morning of the SK320 revision before the exam in the afternoon.

For a 30 point course, the volume of material is enormous with 1400 A4 pages. That’s roughly equivalent to 2000 normal Open University sized pages and doesn’t, of course, include the 20-odd tutorials with their associated notes. Some of the “read if you have time” references were even larger with HEAT running to around 3000 pages all by itself.

So what’s left to revise? Well, loads seeing as it’s been taking longer than expected to get my revision notes into shape.

I’m in the midst of phase one, in which I go through my copy of the learning outcomes and chapter summaries and add diagrams and notes from the text that seem to be missing from the summaries. Given the sheer volume of the original text, this is taking ages to do and I really need to get that done in the next two weeks before I move onto phase 2 of my revision. For S377, this took a while due to the diagrams but it’s mostly text this time around. The group this year has one very visual person who’s been plugging away running up diagrams for many of the major topics which look like they’ll be quite useful in that final week.

Phase two, which I do in the final week is reading through the enhanced summaries produced in phase one. For SK320, there are 30 pages which amounts to roughly ten pages per block – a fairly manageable amount of text to read through and, hopefully, memorise. Also in this phase I’ll be looking over the past papers and specimen exam paper. Since this is a fairly new course, there are only two past papers but in principle I could also look at the past papers of the predecessor course, S320.

One addition to phase two this time around is the part C topic which, this year, is on MERS. We’ve to research this and on the day will be asked to write a report on specific aspects of it. I’ve read over the initial research and given that it’s only a 500-600 word answer that they’re looking for, that’s probably enough to read over. What I’ve not, yet, done is sort out two potential tables or diagrams which they want in the answer.

Finally, there’s also the business of gathering together the things for the exam bag. This time, that’s fairly easy as it’s the same things that I needed for S377 which means the various coloured pencils, rulers, pens, pencils, Lucozade, wine gums and ID. Going by the quite strict timelimits on the parts of the exam, there won’t be time for a whole lot of “wine gum moments” but it’s hard to say at this point as I’ve not really looked at any past papers.

Last, but not least, is a bit of familiarisation with the exam format. As with most biology papers, this is divided into three distinct parts. The first is 10 from a choice of 12 short questions covering the whole course but not in a whole lot of detail. As always, these are a bit hit and miss but, usually, my revision notes get me through this section. The second part is the data handling question which can sometimes be done without knowing a whole lot about the course itself though it can throw you a bit if you know nothing about the topic covered. Finally, there’s the research question which this year is on MERS. I’m not really keen on that type of question as you could do loads of research and find that they asked something that you didn’t cover or you could do a very basic amount and find that it was on exactly what you’d read.

Marks-wise, if you’ve passed the assignments, the overall course mark is entirely dependent on the exam mark. That in turn is broken down with 50% on the short questions and 25% each for the data handling and research questions. The research question has a peculiar marking scheme: 1 mark for a title of up to 10 words, 2 for an abstract of up to 40 words, 2 each for your introduction and conclusion, 2 for each of two diagrams/tables, 2 for the style and 12 for the content. Given that the question they tend to ask you to address usually seems to have four parts, that’s three points per part so it’s not a total disaster if you can’t answer one or two of them. Thus far, I’ve done rather well with the marks on this course and a disctinction seems within striking distance but, of course, that could change dramatically on the day.

Campbell is a massive school with a number of quite large buildings, a fair number of smaller ones plus assorted sports fields dotted around an enclosed estate of around 100 acres. Or, in short, it’s a massive place for an 11 or 12 to get used to.

As a consequence of that, they have a whole day of familiarisation for the new starts the day before the rest of the school starts back. In theory, that gets them to know where all their classes are but in practice they all seem to have forgotten by the next day. That combined with the school ethos of always doing your best, has led to some tears with some of the kids who find that they haven’t a clue where to go first thing in the morning as they get quite worked up about being late. It’s fine after that because in the first year, the class is just that as all of those in each of the classes go round in a group for the whole year so if one kid knows where to go, they’re fine. Older kids would realise that the teachers will be very forgiving in the first few weeks and they’re not surprised about a few stragglers who’ve gotten lost, but at 11 or 12 it is, of course, a different matter. Courtesy of the two week timetable, it’ll be next Wednesday before they’ve been to all the classes at least once.

Homeworks have, so far, been very easy going affairs ranging from hunting out medieval images for history through to writing out a short critique of a book for English. There’s very much a concentration on English and maths in the timetable with both subjects on nearly every day whilst the other subjects seem generally more like two or three times over the course of the two week timetable (mind you, that’s just my impression as I’ve not got his timetable in front of me).

There is a choice of several after school activities every weekday though they don’t seem to have started yet. That’s understandable as I don’t think the first year people could cope with any more at the moment. Possibles for our little guy include the languages club, fencing, reading club, young enterprise club and perhaps drama. Basically they’ve a mix of sporty things and academic things. On Saturday mornings, there are rugby and hockey with swimming on Saturday and Sunday though he’s ruled out anything that involves getting up early at the weekend.

Other firsts seem to be in the process of being overcome, with the ties getting a touch neater as the week has progressed and the shoes will have been tied a little faster too. Writing with a pen most of the time is something that our little guy has adjusted to really fast – his writing was so neat the other day that I thought someone else had done it. We’ve still not quite a full set of gear for him though I think the main thing remaining is the white sports socks with the mouth guard being measured up for yesterday.

We’ve not quite got properly into our two school routine yet though that’s mainly down to the heap of road works that are ongoing at the moment along seemingly every road. Surprisingly, James being a touch late means that John is a touch late too – we’d expected that John would always be early so long as James was more or less on time. Picking him up is more of a rush than we’d expected too as it can take almost 30 minutes to get between the two schools rather than the 15 or so that we’d expected. Mind you, that doesn’t matter a whole lot as the traffic jam in Campbell is something else sometimes (so far, Friday has been by far the worst day taking 40 minutes to clear last week!).

One major change for us is that his class is tiny so it’s a lot easier to have a chat with his teacher than it has ever been. It’s a big change for him too as there’s no more hiding at the back of the class and I imagine that the level of participation is a good deal higher which can only be for the good.

Overall, it still seems like it was the right choice for him.

Way back in 2009, I finally got going on the first course for my psychology degree (ED209) and was intending to plug away with that over the following four or five years, working through DSE212, DD303 and DD307 along with a couple of other courses to make up the 360 point total. However, one of those “other courses” was SK277 (human biology) and that really got me fired up about biology so I ended up working through the rest of the biology degree which I’ve just about finished.

In the meantime, they totally reorganised the psychology programme and are mid-way through introducing a whole new range of courses that’ll ultimately mean that they’re offering three or four different psychology degrees in place of the one general one that existed when I started. Net effect of being mid-way through and me having done some of the old-style courses is that there’s a confusing choice of modules at the moment.

The new ones seem to have dropped the popular residentials but there’s one remaining on its final run this coming year. That therefore seems to me to be the best spot to start so I’ve signed up with DSE212 and the associated residential DXR222.

After that, it gets quite confusing and I’m not really sure what I need to do to complete the degree. In theory, I could do the old-style degree but that needs to be completed before the end of 2017 which in turn means that I would need to do up to four 60 point modules over two years which seems a bit much at the moment. If I don’t do that, I would need to complete under the new-style regulations which is the same number of modules but without the need to complete by 2017.

What modules though? On the new-style degree there’d be E102 and DE100 but that assumes that I can’t count any of my existing modules and some of those fall into the psychology camp. I don’t know what I need to do there at this point. At level 3 there’s the compulsory DE300 plus a choice of three or four others coming up depending on whether you want a general psychology degree, a forensic psychology degree or a counselling degree.

At the moment, the only thing I’m fairly sure about is that I’d need to do DE300, would probably need to do DE100 and would probably do EK313. So, another call to the SMT people is called for I think.