Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

I’ve been plugging away at a modern languages degree part-time for what seems like a lifetime sometimes but now that I’m getting to the end of it, I’m looking beyond it to what I might do next.

Since the final course of the degree is an English language one, I’ll be left with effectively half of a Diploma in English so I’ve been toying with the idea of doing the other half to tidy up that loose end but I’m going to wait ’til I see what next years course is like before I commit myself to that.

I’d also quite like to do a creative writing course at some point. However, to do that there’s a sort-of prerequisite consisting of a humanities course therefore I’ve bought the recommended texts for that one and have been working through them over the last few weeks. English literature isn’t really my thing if those particular books are anything to go by! That of itself has put me off considering seriously the full blown degree in English that I’d be almost half-way to achieving if I do the creative writing course.

On a separate tack I quite fancy doing the chemistry degree that I was toying with many years ago and bought one of the recommended books for that. Although it’s been getting on for 30 years since I did that subject, I’m finding the book a relatively easy read, especially considering that it’s a second year university text.

Anyway, if you’re thinking of doing a particular course, why not buy one or two of the recommended texts before you get to the point of commiting yourself to the course. You might find, as I did, that the “harder” course is more appealing and that of itself will almost certainly make it feel easier to you.

It’s taken over a year but, at last, James has finally come out with a spontaneous word in French!

‘Twas a really ordinary event in that we asked him where we’d parked the car and he said “la”. Still, it’s a start.

So, if you’re moving to France, don’t rely on the TV families moving and assume that yours will be completely fluent in three months. Some might be, but it can take a lot longer than that as we’re finging out.

I’m toying with the idea of doing a degree in english language & literature so I thought I’d have an initial look at some of the books for the first of the literature courses as I’ve already read all but one of the english language books for the degree.

The first of these is Jane Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea which I just finished the other day.

It was written in the 1940’s and it’s set in the Jamaica of 1830 ie just after slavery was abolished and consists essentially of a few incidents that happen to a family in that era from three different viewpoints.

The first thing that’s perhaps most striking to the modern reader is the sheer number of things that are deemed to require footnotes as explanation. Ordinarily that would say to me that this isn’t a book that can stand on its own and indeed it doesn’t because it takes characters from Jane Eyre and develops them more fully. But it isn’t that which hit me. It was that they felt that things such as “mango” needed an explanation yet today they are commonplace items in supermarkets.

It’s also written in quite an antiquated fashion with effectively three “chapters” to the book which itself is quite short (120 odd pages) compared to modern novels. I’m sure that it’s terribly presumptious of me, but I didn’t think that it was terribly well written.

Still, it wasn’t anything like the hard slog that I thought it might have been and I’m well into the next book, Pygmalion, which, so far, isn’t bad either.

To complete my Modern Languages degree, I “just” need to do one more course and that one is English which’ll be somewhat odd as all the exams and whatnot that I’ve done over the last six years have been in foreign languages.

It does leave me with one slight problem in that the English course I need to do is half of a Diploma in English Language. It’s not that I have to do the second course due to university regulations or anything but rather that I don’t like to leave an overhang of half a diploma like that.

Therefore, it looks like I’ll be doing a course in English grammar just after the English course that I actually need to do.

After that, it’s a bit up in the air and really far too early to be thinking much about it. Not that it has stopped me thinking about it, of course.

At the moment, I would have two basic ways that I’d consider going after completing the English diploma. The first is that I’d like to do their creative writing course (which, hopefully, would improve the quality of writing here) but that has a pre-requisite Humanities course so it’s a two year deal. Alternatively, I’ve always fancied doing a chemistry degree.

Going down the creative writing route would mean that I’d have 2/3rds of an English degree, the final third consisting of two literature courses. As a bit of preparation for that I’ve just bought all the recommended books for the first of those courses. Just to see what it might be like at this point, and not really committing myself to it. I’ve also bought a couple of books for the chemistry course so there’s quite a bit of reading material lying around at the moment!

You’d think that I’m getting paid for writing this stuff, but I’m not; I just think they’re brilliant.

Although the OU has been on the go since the early 1970’s strangely enough there doesn’t appear to be any serious competitor for them in the English-speaking world (there’s a rough equivalent in Spain). On first glance it would appear that there are equivalents in America but when you look in more detail at them you find that they do post graduate stuff or skip out the first year or two of a normal course. Even those that don’t do that only offer a limited range of programmes whereas the OU offers a very complete programme, the only major omission being medicine.

How come it doesn’t have any competitors though?

It’s quite hard to say in that these days Internet delivery of the courses means that a university can be anywhere whereas obviously it was harder to launch on a correspondence basis in the 1970s. Where it did have the advantage is that it had substantial government money behind it in the early days and perhaps that’s not been available elsewhere in the world up to now.