Foreign Perspectives

Compared to the Child Development course, the Human Biology one is moving along at what almost seems like a snails pace in comparison which probably is indicative of how over the top the workload was on the Child Development course.

The first tutorial is just coming up now, just over a month into the course or rather a month into the official course timetable as I started over a month before that, albeit with a gap of several weeks for the psychology revision. Somewhat to my surprise, even with that gap, I’m running several weeks ahead of the official schedule at the moment though I’ve not so far completed all the notes.

I’ve made a start on the assignment already or at least on the easy parts of it. It’s a three part assignment with two short answer questions and a short-ish essay. The short answer questions seem relatively easy and I’d have completed them already except that I’ve to draw a couple of graphs for them and I’ve not had a chance to do that yet. The essay is basically on the workings of the digestive tract and is what prompted me to get going on writing up the notes as there’s a serious amount of detail in that chapter (and the nutrition one before it).

Funnily enough, although I initially figured that the digestive tract chapter was seriously complicated now that I’ve written up the notes it seems to have largely fallen into place in my mind. The various sphincters make sense as separators between the various sections of the gut and I could even make a passable explation of what the pancreas gets up to. All being well the other parts of this course will similarly fall into place in my mind as it goes on.

Whilst I’m getting into the swing of the human biology course, the cardiovascular diseases one is something else together.

In principle, the human biology course as a level 2, 30 point course should clearly be harder than the cardiovascular diseases courses which weighs in at level 1 and only 15 points. However, at the moment the reverse is very much the case although it’s early days for both courses.

With the human biology course, we’ve moved through a very easy going introductory chapter, onto a much more serious one on the structure of cells, through a long list of aspects of nutrition to finish with a very thorough going through (literally!) of the digestive system. I can’t say that I remember all of that as yet though all being well, after I’ve ran up my notes for it things will be somewhat clearer.

The cardiovascular course kicked off with quite a terminology loaded introductory chapter before going straight into the detail of how the cardiovascular system works. If nothing else, when I come across the same topic in the third book of the human biology course, it’ll seem really simple in comparison! Still, at least the next couple of chapters look like a much easier ride and the assignment questions look reasonably doable (there’s no exam for this).

The reason for the apparent discrepancy in the actual and apparent level of these courses is largely down to how the OU assign levels to courses. In practice, it’s the assignments and exam (if any) that are taken to establish the level of the course rather than the course content. Thus, the assignments in the cardiology course are easier than those in the human biology course. On the other hand, the apparent level of each course from the students point of view is very different: if it were me, I’d have put the cardiology course at level three and if the assignments matched the complexity of the first couple of chapters that’s where it would be.

Personally, I’d have preferred it to have been set at level three although that would have meant I’d not have done the course for a few years. As it is, I suspect that the dropout rate will be very high for the cardiology. As per usual, I’ll be too stubborn to drop out but will be mainly looking on it as pre-revision for the cardiology section of the human biology course.

The Vanessa George affair showed the major weakness of the CRB system ie that you’ll get an “all clear” if you haven’t been caught yet.

However, the various schools are required to have the CRB check done on anyone who comes into contact with children. Thus last year our offer of assistance to go along and help with the supervision on a couple of school outings was turned down.

Ironically, this year we are allowed to go along even though all we’ve done is to put the form in for the CRB check to be done. How come? Well, there’s such a backlog of checks to be done that they have to operate essentially as they’ve always done and assess whether or not a given parent is a risk to the children. That seems to be close to offering the best of both worlds in using the CRB as a backup to the judgement of the teachers.

So all being well, we’ll be off to seen round the airport by the time you read this.

I’ve been weaning everyone off Windows over the past year so we’re getting into the first multi-computer upgrade of Ubuntu.

One of the problems seems to be that an Ubuntu upgrade seems to take forever if you’ve been installing bits and pieces of software over the course of the year. Of course, that’s pretty much the situation everyone is in thus it seems to be over 10 hours for everyone (my Aspire One weighed in at 15 hours).

On the other hand, a new install of 9.10 on another Aspire One took under 30 minutes although there’s another hour to download prior to the install.

Granted, there’s more software to download in an upgrade and indeed that “30 minute” install will likely end up at two or three hours counting downloading time. That’s still a long, long way short of the 10-15 hour times for upgrades though.

I’m going to see if I can speed things up somewhat for the next upgrade by copying the downloaded packages from /var/cache/apt/archives. There’s the “proper” way to do this but it sounds simpler to just copy all the .deb files and plonk them on with dpkg. Doing that should mean that I can get away with a backup, clean install and package install for the last couple of machines with the only thing remaining being setting up the Internet and email on them.

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.