Foreign Perspectives

Starting a degree at level two causes me the minor problem that I’ll be short 60 points by the time I finish what would have ordinarily been the final course had I started at level one.

In the course of looking at how I might pick up those 60 points I’d already started on 30 of them courtesy of the human biology (SK277) course that I’m doing at the moment. That course opened my eyes to the interest of biology generally and the biology short courses in particular which comprise an interesting collection ranging from the likes of cardiology and diabetes through to obesity and nutrition, mostly in the form of 15 point courses. Scheduling-wise, it was cardiology that fitted best and seeing as something like 30% of all deaths are down to that, it seemed like something worth knowing about.

What I’d not allowed for was that this is very clearly a medical subject and the first couple of chapters of the book were seriously heavy going for me. I reckoned that none of the terminology would ever sink in but thing like atria and ventricles make sense to me now although I’m sure there’s a vast amount of the vocabulary that hasn’t yet sunk in.

Sadly, it looks like quite a number of the students in the group have already dropped out of the course. Out of a possible 25 or so, only five have had any input to the recent activity. Ordinarily, I’d have thought that participation in the online forum where the “tutorials” are conducted would be higher as you don’t get the “real-life” issues that generally stop people turning up at regular tutorials.

As usual, I will, of course, be just too stubborn to drop out but I’ll be researching  short courses a little more thoroughly before signing up in future. Certainly the 15 point ones as they seem, by and large, to be shorter versions of 30 point courses rather than a separate breed of course as the 10 point ones are.

Although we were working pretty hard in the hotel this time last year, I don’t know how we’d manage to fit it into our lives these days.

Monday to Friday it sometimes seems like we’re operating an almost full-time taxi service. From 7.30am to 9.30am we’re definitely full-time school organisers. For the first couple of months of P1 we’d a break of sorts to 11.30am before collecting John but at least it’s now up to 2pm. From 2pm to 3pm we’re getting the guys back home though on Tuesday’s we’re straight off to Kumon again.

Even Saturday isn’t free as we’re to get James to Kumon for 10am and with Wendy off to work in the afternoon there’s not much of the day left by the time she’s off. Somehow Sunday always seems to disappear though in different ways each week.

In between times, there’s the psychology degree that I’m doing too which is currently taking up a fair bit of time as I’m trying to get ahead of the official schedules with the two courses I’m doing at the moment.

And then there’s the ongoing admin relating to our attempts to close down our life in France which seems to be taking up even more time than actually running the hotel!

One of the great things about the Open University is that you can sign up for pretty much any course that takes your fancy yet that’s also one of the problems with it too from the student point of view.

It’s fine if you know what you want to do. No hassles with having to prove that you meet the entry requirements for a course: just register for the course and you’re accepted. That applies in exactly the same way for honours level courses as it does for those aimed at prospective students who have no prior qualifications at all.

As far as the different levels go, clearly the best plan is to start at the lowest level and work your way up. However, if, like me, you have some prior qualifications then you don’t have to go through the major hassles that can arise when you fancy doing something new but in a similar line to something you’ve done before.

Where you do hit a problem though is when you don’t really have a clear idea of where you’re headed with your qualification. The sheer number of courses can make selecting your next course quite a challenge. Not only that, but you can come seriously unstuck if the series of courses that you think you need isn’t the series that you really need. Apparently one student who’d set their heart on teaching thought that the best plan was to do all the courses listed in the education faculty and only found out some six years down the line that they’d have to start all over again.

For the really undecided there’s even the option of an “open” degree (the equivalent of the general degree of other universities) which can include pretty much any courses that are offered.

One of the biggest problems in getting out of France is the sheer quantity of post and email that continues to generate.

This wasn’t so bad when we were actually working in the hotel as we were online daily and keeping on top of everything that came in but now that we’re away from that we don’t have nearly so much time to devote to that as it seems to need. For instance, in the past week I needed to go through dozens of pieces of post and thousands of emails only to find a mere handful that were relevant and needed action taken on them.

Despite France having quite a strict no-spamming law, the quantity of junk email coming from France far exceeds that from anywhere else in the world and almost all of it seems to contravene the French law. The reason why that should be is quite simple: French ISPs require anonymous logins to their mail servers so anyone can send anything and, of course, they do.

One of the greatest hassles in our lives at the moment is that we’ve to try to sort out some administration with the French tax and social security people whilst we’re in the UK.

You’d think that it would be relatively easy to do as you can obviously use email, faxes, phone calls and even letters but in practice it just isn’t. For one thing, French fax machines seem to work on a different standard as other places as faxes from the UK aren’t accepted by the French fax machines that I’ve tried (even sending from a French fax machine!). Phone calls just don’t seem to get you anywhere and emails rarely receive any response. You might think that leaves letters as a workable approach but even that doesn’t always seem to work. In fact, the French lettre recommandé is the only approach to use but, of course, that’s not available outside France, is it?

Actually, even in France we found that the only really reliable way to do things was to visit the office concerned though flying over all the time is hardly a viable option.