Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

When John started school this year he only went to noon which wasn’t too bad as it gave us a sensible break before needing to go back for James at 2.30pm.

However, they changed that to a 1.30pm finish for John the week before the holidays which was a major pain for everyone with more than one child at the school. That hour just doesn’t give you enough time to really do anything yet it’s a bit pointless hanging around the school too.

Still, they’re now onto a 2.15pm finish so at least we can pick them both up at the same time now. That’s also given us a lot more time to do our own thing in the mornings so, all being well, I’ll be able to get caught up with everything that just didn’t seem to fit into what turned out to be a very limited period in the mornings.

Also on another schedule is James’ Kumon. Thanks to something of a buildup of kids going to it, they’ve had to give us broad timeslots for the two days as it was getting just too crowded at times. In practice, we’re going to our regular Tuesday slot at 4pm which seems to work fairly well but I’m not so sure about the 10am Saturday morning slot. The snag is that on Saturdays sometimes we have a bit of a lie-in but other times we want to get out early to go somewhere. With a fixed timeslot for James the lie-ins won’t be possible though aiming for a later slot would mean we couldn’t get out anywhere which isn’t good either.

Not that it looks like it’ll matter much. With the arrival of James’ glasses it seems clear that it was his eyesight that was causing the reading difficulties so he may be shooting ahead with that over the next month or two.

Up to now I’ve stuck with one course per year in my time with the Open University which has given that time something of a pottering along feel to it all.

However, I managed to let myself get talked into thinking about overlapping courses over the coming year which means that I now find myself sort-of doing 90 points worth of courses over the next couple of weeks. I say sort-of as I’m not actually doing anything on the human biology course at the moment as I’m working on revising for the child development on the 21st.

Well not quite “nothing” as I’ve been dipping into the forum for the course and picked up the assignments for it last night. Frankly, the level of them is something of a shock. I thought that I’d find this course relatively hard going as I’ve not even done GCSE biology but I’d have been able to do the first couple of questions on the assignment in a matter of an hour or perhaps two. Having said that, the first assignment is mainly health rather than biology based so it avoids the difficult parts of the first book so perhaps later assignments and the exam will be a different matter.

That in turn has me thinking of signing up for the Biological Psychology (SD226) course which starts in February and which would have five months of overlap with the human biology course. It’s got a reputation of being rather difficult though so I’m going to have a look at the course texts before I do anything drastic.

I’d been planning on writing up the notes on gender identity and running up another chunk of the answer for the seen question but in the end very little of either got done. The gender identity stuff should get written tomorrow and looks like a fairly easy one to do though there’s quite a heap of other things needing done tomorrow as well.

James woke up feeling a bit the worse for wear and with quite a temperature. That knocked the normal Sunday morning routine out somewhat but at least he was feeling reasonably OK by around noon so ’twas off to the “adventurous playground” in the Cave Hill Country Park. We’d been aiming to go there for a couple of weeks as we’d spotted it on our way to the zoo a few weeks back. It looks quite impressive from outside but isn’t really all that large as parks go these days mainly because almost all the local authorities seem to have decided to up the ante in terms of what equipment a playground has over recent years. Playgrounds that were pretty naff just a few years ago now seem to sport an enormous number of climbing frames and all kinds of other things for the kids nowadays. Anyway, it’s made the £2 per child entry fee seem fairly steep.

Anyway, once they’d worked their way round all the gear there (aside from the castle construction it’s nothing spectacular) it was going to be off for lunch but we happened to pass the public playground at Jordanstown on the way. Boy has it had a major upgrade over the last couple of years! Gone are the couple of swings and the largely broken down boat and in their place is quite a spectacular array of stuff for children from preschool through to young teenagers which, as you would expect, was being very well used.

And finally it was off to Papa Brown’s Grill at Carrickfergus where we’d a very enjoyable meal before heading home.

Sniffling, coughing and sneezing have been working their way through all of us over the past week or so thanks to to James & John bringing these home from school.

Yesterday it was James’ turn to feel a bit off but now that he’s back to school ’tis the turn of John and me to feel dreadful.

Oh well, I guess another week or two and they’ll have worked their way through the range of minor colds and whatnot that their friends have…

I’m generally a message in a bottle kind of person as far as political activism goes rather than being that proactive with firing off letters to all and sundry as Wendy tends to do.

However, I thought that I’d drop the new Open University vice-chancellor, Martin Bean, a line about my thoughts on some rather undesireable side-effects of the ELQ fiasco. Specifically, the dropping of all but one of the science summer schools and the associated dropping of all the crop of named science degrees.

The summer schools have been a fixture of many Open University degrees from the very start. They’re the time when one feels like a “real” student for a week. They’re the time when one has the chance to get together with a whole heap of fellow students for all kinds of activities (ranging from serious study to, sometimes, the less high-minded student activities). They’re the time that one sees the Open University in the flesh.

The snag is that whilst up until a number of years ago the summer schools were an integral part of the regular courses, they were almost all separated off five or ten years ago as courses were rewritten. Thus whilst the original S100 science foundation course included a summer school, the updated S104 doesn’t and instead there’s a separate course made up entirely of the former summer school. That has the consequence that the summer school is now optional and therefore almost impossible to get a sponsor to pay for it and so many fewer people do the summer schools these days.

To add to the problems, the current proposal is to implement these changes over the next couple of years. That would be fast enough in a normal university where degrees typically span three or at most four years. In “OU-time”, it’s incredibly rapid as degrees can take anything from six to as many as eleven years even without breaks between courses. Thus even people who are well through their degree can be affected. One of those on the forum who’s almost at the end of her degree has already been forced into doing one of the summer schools a year or two “too soon” because it seems unlikely that the final summer school that she needs will be replaced after it expires. She’s one of the lucky ones: many of those at the start of their degrees will find that they can’t complete the degree they were aiming for as the required summer schools (and perhaps other courses) will long since have been cancelled by the time they’d be doing them.

Anyway, Martin tells me that he will be raising the issue fairly soon. I’m sure that this issue and other ELQ related ones will make his time an “interesting” one.

I was going to say that I was surprised to receive a personal reply from him the day after I sent my little missive but actually I’m not. It’s just what one would expect from the Open University vice chancellor and it’s good to see that he’s already taken the “open” part onboard.