Foreign Perspectives

When we moved to France we drove our car there with the intention of officially importing it at some stage.

However, we were rather busy in the first few months in France setting things up, then spent the rest of that first year trying to catch up on various bits of administration that we’d put off in the early part of the year. Thus it was quite late on that we started looking into importing the car.

By then we’d become rather wary of the circular path that administration often takes in France and so it was no great surprise to find that it was going to be almost impossible to import our car. Compounding the difficulties was that it was a grey (ie personal) import to the UK so it didn’t have the European type approval. That added another circle of administration to be worked through.

Fortunately in some ways the car developed a couple of what seemed like major problems if the garages were to be believed (which we later found out were relatively trivial things) at around the time when we needed to do something concrete in terms of importing the car. So we ended up just leaving it in the car park for the next six years. It’s not that we intended to do nothing about it, just that one thing or another always had a higher priority and besides the more we looked at the administration required to import it officially, the more we tended to look away.

Anyway, it’s obviously not worth a whole lot now and it’s become one of the French annoyances that need to be cleared up so we thought we’d either sell it or at least get it towed away.

It turns out that thanks to the French love of administration that we can do neither until we can come up with some ownership papers that they will recognise. The ancient log book was never going to be a runner in their eyes even if we could find it so we figured that we’d get the new V5 certificate which is a European style document that they should recognise. Now, those that have read the small print of their own V5 certificate will note that it specifically says that it’s not proof of ownership but seemingly is accepted as such in France as it is here.

So, after finally getting the VIN without which the DVLA said they wouldn’t issue a new one, we set off to Coleraine this morning. We’d a couple of queries so couldn’t use the local offices hence the trip to Coleraine. Nope, can’t issue you that. There’s a note on the record that says the car was exported back in 2005. Well, would you expect anything to do with European administration to be easy?

After some debate, it turns out that they can issue the export certificate which they should have issued back in 2005 though. This contains the same information as the V5 and moreover is free. All being well, the French will accept it.

Since I finished reading the week 2 material so early in the week, I’m making a small start on week 3.

This moves on from consideration of the invention of agriculture in south west Asia to look at how it developed in south-east Asia. For the first time this highlights some differences in how things are spelled in the American spelling used in the course text compared to how they’re spelled in the British English of the course guide. Nothing major so far but it’s odd to see the Yangtze River appearing as the Yangtzi River.

On other fronts, I’ve started on my course summary rather early based on the chapter summaries on the website. As summaries go, they’re a bit too complete as they weigh in at 250 pages. In practice, it’s not so bad as that sounds as quite a lot of the page count is taken up by long lists of key terms and the like from each chapter. Stripping those out seems to leave around 7 pages per chapter which should mean something like 70-odd pages worth of summary for the chunks of the book that are used during this course which would be rather a lot of reading for exam but should be manageable in the smaller chunks required for the TMAs and ECA.

I see that the book is available as an ebook so all being well the OU will provide the searchable PDF version rather than what seemed to be a scanned version going by a student who’d done the course a few years ago.

I left this course to the one side for a couple of weeks whilst revising for the astronomy exam so it was Saturday before I found that I’d my expected two weeks worth of work to be done (which took a couple of hours) and that the ECA had arrived the day before.

In terms of marking it’s 60% for the two reports (1000 words for the client, 2000 words for the design team), 30% for the four web pages and 10% for the overall structure and presentation. Sounds like quite a lot of writing at this point although a quick glance at the ECA shows that there are quite a lot of sections to both reports which always makes for easier writing. To a large degree those sections are even stated in the ECA. With six sections listed for the client report, 1000 words doesn’t sound much, the five sections for the colleagues report doesn’t sound like enough for 2000 words.

Arriving at some stage today is the second CMA for the course which I hope to complete sometime this week along with the SK185 ECA. The last one took under an hour so hopefully this one won’t be a major undertaking either.

I’m at week 6 of the course material (a couple of weeks ahead of the official schedule) which means CSS. That chapter of the book is heavier going not because it’s difficult but rather because it’s going through every keyword of CSS which makes for quite a boring read. Still, only 10 pages to go and that’ll be completed. I’ve picked up a couple of things from it which would have been handy to know a few years back when I was writing the Inns sites though mostly it’s been revision for me, hence rapid pace through the reading (boy was the tables chapter tedious!). There’s a longer than usual course guide for this week which I’ll be reading during the week (thus far they’ve basically said “read chapter X of the course text and do these hands-on assignments”).

As far as the hands-on assignments go, thus far I’ve been able to skim through them fairly quickly but if you were using this as a course to learn HTML and CSS you’d be looking at a fairly serious time commitment which is something that I must bear in mind for later courses in the certificate as I’ll be running some of those alongside a logjam of other courses now and again.

On other fronts, reading on A251 is progressing quite quickly now as it’s on to concrete developments in the agriculture of south-west asia (where it was invented) so it looks like the 30 or so pages a week of reading won’t be the chore that it looked initially. The course doesn’t officially start ’til November 6th by which time it looks like I’ll be three weeks ahead and so be starting into the first TMA. I’ve had confirmation that the course text is available as PDF from the end of this week but it looks like it might be an image scan rather than a proper resizeable PDF so I’m not sure how that’ll work on the reader.

Probably the biggest plus point of the Kumon is that you need to sit down five nights a week with the kids to get the homework done. It was, of course, the biggest minus point too as it’s a 365 day a year deal which meant that, in practice, one or other of the little guys threw up the head now and again and so did we. However, homework is important as it shows you how the kids are doing much more directly than any report from the teacher will do. Missing the twice weekly classes wasn’t a problem really as the teacher could hand out sheets to cover any absences on our part or indeed for her own holidays.

It’s quite different at Kip McGrath. For one thing the teacher is a teacher with quite a lot of years of experience. Thus she’s not tied to the Kip McGrath system quite so rigidly as is the case with Kumon. So, in our case, she’s doing a combination of the maths and English programmes each week and we didn’t have to choose between them as we thought at first we would have to do. It’s a 52 week per year system rather than a 365 day per year one so there’s one 80 minute class per week rather than the two 40 minute ones (20 mins per subject) for Kumon. We’ve not hit a holiday period so I don’t know how that works out but John missed a class two weeks ago and so had a “make-up” class last week. Homework isn’t nearly so structured although in practice it’s working out at around five nights a week split between some maths and some English for James.

Which one is better though? In terms of cash, Kumon is £50 a month per subject, Kip McGrath is around £100 so it’s more expensive if you’re only doing one subject. However, we were finding that for John his maths was getting so far ahead of his reading that he was getting to the point that he couldn’t do the maths because he couldn’t read the questions which basically forced us to do two subjects.

In terms of quality of education, Kip McGrath seems streets ahead. The highly repetitive nature of Kumon suits early maths really well though didn’t seem so good on the English. That repetitive nature was leading to a certain amount of boredom for the kids so we’d have been moving on in a year or two. It’s noticeable that very, very few Kumon kids were coming in with year 3 or 4 boxes so it would appear that 2 to 3 years is about the most that the majority of people stay with them. Having said that, Kip McGrath feels more like a 2 or 3 year max programme too in that most of the promo material seems to be aimed at getting kids to where they should be in the class. Now in our case, James needs that help at the moment but John is already where he should be so the Kip classes should be moving him ahead so we’ll be able to compare over the next year.

Will there be a problem with the school if you move the kids too far ahead? That’s something that was mentioned by the Kumon teacher when we enrolled. Some schools do have issues with kids who are well ahead of the rest of the class. The school they’re in at the moment were quite keen that we were helping both the little guys along and seem to have the same basic view as me ie that it’s much better to err on the side of being too far ahead. Having said that, I imagine that if at some point we find ourselves with the guys several years ahead of their class in maths or English that it could create some problems. However, I’m sure that it’s better to have problems like that than to have them well behind their class.

The biggest problem with commission payments is that they’re dependent on transactions taking place.

That’s fine during good economic times. Nobody minds too much paying the estate agent a few thousand to sell their house when house prices are rising and houses are selling in a reasonable time. Moreover, when the estate agent values (ie guesses) the price that your house will sell for they’ll tend to go a little high as that increases their commission a little bit.

However, these are still quite bad economic times. Houses aren’t selling fast. Thus to get an income the estate agent will generally underestimate the value of your house. That may reduce the value of your property in terms of commission for them but selling more houses quicker at lower prices is better for them financially than selling a few houses over a long period of time.

So don’t forget that it’s your house, not theirs. Your interest is in getting the best price you can, theirs is in getting it sold fast.