Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

The Open University tutorials are always on Saturdays so you sort-of get into the way of assuming that all their activities are on Saturdays. Well, they usually are but the exams aren’t and it certainly throws me for one.

This year was particularly confusing in that the exam was in Dublin for the first time rather than in Belfast so the local Dublin hotels did rather well out of that. How come we didn’t get paid £70 each because the exam was in Dublin though? After all, they’d have charged us £70 each if it was us that asked for it to be in Dublin (ie abroad).

Hmmm, wonder if they’d pay up if we all asked?

Well, that’s an easy question: it’s the English course that I need to complete my modern languages degree.

The snag is that you need to tell them a) before you know the results of the course before it and b) in the midst of the hardest part of your current course. Therefore, it’s best to have decided upon the course for 2009 before you have even started the course for 2008.

Now, up to now, this hasn’t been a problem for me. I started the French way back in 2002 and for the next three years obviously I was going to be doing successive French courses. Likewise for the Spanish from 2005. Getting towards the end of the degree threw me a little but made the next logical course the English one which completes the BA (Honours) Modern Languages degree.

Now, you’re probably thinking that I’ve reached the end of the degree therefore there aren’t any more courses to consider.

In a sense that’s right but once you’ve stopped studying for a while it’s really, really hard to get going again as I found out when I left an 8 year gap between the BSc (Hons) Computer Science and the MBA. Therefore, I have kept going with small courses ever since. Nothing major for sure between 1993 and 2002 but enough to keep the brain ticking over and that made it a whole lot easier to get going on the current degree.

Anyway, I’m sort of toying with the idea of starting off on a science degree for a change They work in a similar way to the languages in that I’d pick up two diplomas along the way. One major difference is that most of the courses are 30 points rather than 60 which makes them considerably more doable.

So, ’tis probably going to be S104 next year. Or it might be The Art of English which would complete a Diploma in English.

Must get a coin out when the signing up time arrives 🙂

It sounded like a good idea at the time that I booked it but flying over to Belfast on Friday (an all day affair due to the connecting flight), then needing to drive down to Dublin on Sunday for my Spanish exam on Monday, back to Belast on the Monday night only to go back to Dublin on the Tuesday for the flight to Girona wasn’t quite such a good move in practice.

The trip worked out fine though it’s pretty much knocked me out today and I’m only starting to recover now!

This is the first of the posts on the new computer which I’ve been setting up today. Just had a pleasant surprise when I checked the mail: for some reason it’s been a very popular time for people to pay me money. I’ve several new premium listings on the directory, a whole raft of paid post money from last month and to top it all, a paid entry for the listings sites.

Perhaps I should go away more often!

It seems like a very, very long time ago that I thought I’d best get myself fluent in French if I ever wanted to live in France.

Some years after that initial thought, I started French with the Open University and three years later found myself the very proud owner of a Diploma in French. That should have been the end of that, but…. by that time we’d started picking up a fair number of Spanish guests so I thought I’d restart my long forgotten Spanish.

‘Tis now three years since I did that and the final exam for the Diploma in Spanish is next Monday.

Now that I’ve gotten this far, it turns out that one more course is enough to get me a BA (Hons) in Modern Languages which is definitely something I never ever thought there’d even be the remotest possibility of adding to my name. That “one more course” happens to be a level two English course which, all being well, I’ll be starting next February.

It still hasn’t fully sunk in that I have a Diploma in French and I get the certificate out now and again even now in case it was all a dream!

What next after the English though?

Well, as it happens, I’ll have an overhang of one course at that point (assuming that I pass the Spanish next week and the English next year). So, one more English course gets me a Diploma in English. That in turn leaves an overhang of one course towards the next degree…..

As I near the end of the Spanish course, one thing after another is getting finished off.

Yesterday, it was the end of the books that I reached. It seems like only yesterday when I was starting the first one yet it was right at the start of January!

Tonight, was the final get-together of our little online Spanish group. We’ve been getting together off and on for the last three years and ’twas the final meeting this evening so the headset has had its final use…. unless I take the head staggers and sign up for the German or perhaps the Italian course, of course…

Next week sees the exam so there’ll be something of a gap in the posts from me from later this week ’til at least Wednesday of next week.