Foreign Perspectives

It doesn’t seem that long since I started S377 back in February but now the final exam is just over a week from now.

It’s a course that’s really heavy going for quite long stretches as it delves down so low in biology that often you can’t see the wood for the trees. So, instead of looking at reproduction as prophase and whatnot, you look down below that to see what molecules are making the chromatin separate out and reform in the various stages. Rather than look at the cell membrane, you look at how proteins get assembled within it, cross it and generally move around. Rather than just considering DNA as a unit, you’re looking at how it reproduces itself and fixes any errors in that process.

So, MUCH more detailed than you find elsewhere in biology. Consequently, you don’t really get a handle on what’s happening until towards the end of the course and the revising is really helping my understanding of what I went through over the last nine months or so. Whether that extra understanding will help in the exam is, of course, a totally different matter.

Anyway, that takes me up to the final course of the life science degree which is SK320 Infectious Disease starting in February with the chemistry counterpart kicking off towards the end of October. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to sweep up the chemistry courses within the biology degree as there doesn’t seem to be enough chemistry courses to make up a chemistry degree as per my original plan (basically I’ve used them up in the biology degree and only have environmental ones that aren’t really that interesting to me). Assuming that I can do that, I’ll be restarting the psychology degree next October.

Looking at before I signed up for it, it looked like book 1 was chemistry and book 2 was biology. That’s what it is on paper but in reality “book 2” is the main book and the chemistry is slotted in as needed along the way with the final chunky section a medical science one that seems to be tying all the other bits together in a fashion.

As with all the modern science courses there’s a lot of it online, mostly for economic reasons rather than educational ones. They could put that final section of the course on a DVD (or at least make it easily downloadable) but they don’t. You can download it but you need to go through the online study guide and online modules to download each of the videos and texts contained within them. That makes it a bit of a nuisance to work through unless you either read ahead and download everything in advance or have Internet and DVD access available everywhere you study.

It fits in really well with S377 really well, so much so that when I’m reading the book for one I sometimes forget which of the two I’m reading.

One downside of it that I’ve just discovered is that it seems I won’t be able to count it in any degree unless I can slot it into one by 2016 as the new-style OU degrees don’t acknowledge courses that aren’t 30 or 60 points. So, rather than lose the points, I’m having to change the courses I was meaning to do over the next couple of years with the running order for my “miscellaneous interesting courses” degree looks like being S346 Drug design this October, A326 Empire: 1492-1975 the following October and finishing with AA318 Art of the 20th Century in October 2015.

We sometimes despair of ever getting completely out of the French tax system.

It wouldn’t be so bad if they even acknowledged our letters to them but we have only once ever received a direct reply from them and even that place has started writing to us once again. That’s the basic problem really: all correspondence we send just seems to be ignored.

We’ve been trying for over six years to get a tax refund from them. The tax people we spoke to in France agree that we’re due the refund yet nobody seems able to process it. In fact, they even sent a bailiff once who also agreed and helpfully pointed out that the tax in question was now centralised and that we should be writing to the office in Clermont Ferrand. We wrote to them and they said that it’s actually dealt with in the office in Montepellier who we’d been writing to for the previous couple of years, forwarded our letter to them and, of course, that’s the last we heard about that.

Most laughably is the habitation tax and TV license who are quite content to send their letters to us in the UK yet neglect to take on board that the change of address letter also quite clearly said that we don’t live in France.

Mind you we did read some years ago that to really move out we need to provide a document from our local mairie to say that we now live in their commune. Since there isn’t a local mairie (and, no, the city council doesn’t count) and we don’t live in a commune, it’s not possible to provide said document and the advice to the lady enquiring about it was to just let her mail redirection run out.

Looking back on it now, it was remarkably easy for Wendy to settle into life in Northern Ireland 10 years ago. Back then, she could sign up for a doctor, get a UK driving license and even a National Insurance Number wasn’t that difficult.

This time around she already had the NI Number although it turned out that there was a non-obvious form that needed to be completed to tell the tax people that we were now living here rather than in France. She had the driving license too and didn’t even need to get her photo certified as we thought she might have had to.

The doctor was a touch more difficult as they struck her off after about three weeks as they didn’t believe that she intended to live here. That’s one notable difference in the health system from the rest of the UK. Elsewhere you just need to be there to register, in NI you need to prove you intend to continue to live in NI (and, yes, that does, or rather is intended to, apply even to those moving from England to NI).

Social security is rather more difficult and as a result we ended up in court with them last Tuesday as they simply don’t believe that she is legally here at all. It looks like the critical document is going to be one that all concerned totally overlooked but more on that anon as the matter has still to be decided by the judge.

It’s billed as the science of the senses and that’s what’s behind it all though the emphasis on the various senses changes as you move through the course.

Each of the study guides starts with a pointer to what you’ll need to know to understand each section of the course. For instance, for vision you need to know the physics behind how light works as well as bits of biology to understand how the receptors in the eye work and some psychology to understand how the image on your retina is interpreted as a scene. For taste and smell you need quite a bit of chemistry to understand what all the chemicals that they discuss are. Overall, it’s mainly biology and psychology that you need but at times there’s quite a bit of physics and chemistry so, depending on your scientific background, you’ll find that the difficulty in following the course varies quite a bit along the way.

One consistent hassle is that the assignments are far from clear in what they’re asking for. I basically muddled along never being able to predict what my results would be with anything like the accuracy that I usually can. That’s not just me either as a number of comments on the course mention that aspect of the course. I’m not sure why that should be but perhaps it’s an aspect of it being an inter-disciplinary course and maybe they should be more explicit about saying that “the question is on biology” or something like that although even that would be quite difficult as a number of the questions run across more than one discipline.

It’s quite a large course though you wouldn’t necessarily think that from the volume of books that it’s made up from. Where the problem arises from is that there’s a fair chunk of stuff on the DVD and the reader is very, very variable in readability as it’s written by lots of different authors. The study guide points out a number of chapters in it that are particularly difficult. It’s not really that clear why the reader is there as most of the time it covers much the same ground as you’d have already read in the course text, sometimes in more detail but sometimes not. As became clear in my revision, it’s not particularly well integrated with the rest of the course.

Overall, I have mixed feelings about the course. It was in a little more detail than I’d covered in previous biology courses but I didn’t feel that it added an awful lot to that existing knowledge so it didn’t come across as fascinating as I’d expected it would be. For instance, prerequisite courses had already covered vision in almost the same amount of detail and proprioception which was new to me wasn’t really covered in a great deal of detail. On the whole, I wouldn’t really recommend it if you’ve done human biology courses before as there’s not an awful lot of truly new material.