Foreign Perspectives

After getting over the mountain that was the S204 exam, I feel that I’ve been really getting into the chemistry course over the past month or so.

I’ve the third assignment away this morning and it’s the first one that I feel reasonably confident about (though ’til the results come back it could easily be false optimism). Interestingly the biology course is proving increasingly useful as the course moves more into proper chemistry or rather moves away from the largely theoretical side of things and into dealing with how various chemicals react together.

One problem continues to dog progress and that’s that chemistry doesn’t fit easily into the computer age. Actually doing the assignments doesn’t take overly long for the most part but getting the various symbols and diagrams onto the computer eats up the time. To begin with you need to pick up an entirely different font from the normal ones to even be able to type the symbols required and, of course, those symbols aren’t on the keyboard so every one needs to be inserted as a special symbol. The diagrams themselves are equally easy on paper but need a range of software to prepare them for the computer. Even what would appear to be a simple graph can’t be done with normal spreadsheet software because you need to put sub and superscripts on the titles and axes labels.

Still, the plus point of that is that the course team need to make the assignments a little easier to do than they might do otherwise although with the large potential for a few errors to creep in between paper and computer screen, the marks haven’t (yet) reflected that slightly easier aspect.

Also this morning was the third iCMA for the autism course. As usual, it was four questions that could be answered by finding and reading a few paragraphs of the book for each one. Another 100% mark for me which means that I have passed the continuous assessment part of the course already with two more iCMAs left which, for me, are now effectively optional.

In comparison to the chemistry, the autism course is very much a stop-start affair. It’s around one iCMA per month covering one or two chapters of the book and with each chapter only taking a couple of hours to read it’s working out at two or three hours per month to do the course (compared to the official 8 hours a week). The net effect of that is that I generally do an iCMA then read the chapter(s) for the next one and then there’s nothing to do for three weeks. The problems with that approach are that by the time the next iCMA comes around, I’ve to revise the relevant chapter(s) before doing the questions and that overall it’s a very annoying way to progress through the course.