Foreign Perspectives

Just seven days and it’ll all be over or, to put it another way, there just doesn’t seem to be enough time to pack in all the necessary revision.

Actually it does seem fairly doable at the moment and most of the stuff that seemed impossible to understand a few weeks ago makes sense now. I can even remember a reasonable chunk of it.

What I’ve been doing and will be continuing to do is to go over the 29 pages worth of learning outcomes and chapter summaries that I extracted from the books a month or so ago (if you’re doing it this year, you can get this from the TMA4 forum under question 4). I’ve been adding to that where the chapter summaries didn’t seem to be enough to meet the learning outcomes or if I came across a question that couldn’t be answered from them. That’s taking up a surprising amount of time although the amount of information I’m adding isn’t massive: mainly assorted variants of the HR-diagram.

I’ve been saving up a last look at the short questions from the past papers as I want to see if I can do them now. I’ve already gone over the multiple choice questions which, as I said a while back, are much the same as the short questions.

Quite soon I’ll be getting the contents of my exam bag assembled. As with the biology exam in June that’s going to include a calculator and my little drawing set. I don’t think there’s enough time to do a whole lot of drawing for the short questions as there’s only about 20 minutes altogether for each of the three questions on each book.

Given the way the exam paper is broken into so many different parts, it’s worth bearing in mind that the multiple choice questions are only worth 3.5% each so not being able to do one isn’t a disaster (though do guess if need-be: you’ve nothing to lose). Also on the short questions whilst each question might be worth 12%, there are so many parts that you’re looking at as little as 2% for some question parts and, from a quick glance through, never more than 4%. The best approach to these is not to look for the three questions in areas which you know most about but rather for the three questions that are made up of the greatest number of parts which you can answer. Bear in mind that you get points for part answers too. For example, in 2009 3% could be had by listing four ways in which an Elliptical galaxy will differ from the Milky Way; saying just that one is elliptical in shape whilst the other is a spiral and that one is older than the other would potentially net 1.5% without even thinking of anything complicated.

In amongst all that, I’ve started thinking some more about my options for doing the planetary science course (S283). It turns out that thanks to the November start date, it’s not too late to sign up for it this year although registration closes on the 14th so I can’t fiddle about too much. I think it’s probably viable for me in that last year I was able to finish off SK277 (which was my first ever biology course) by late March so there wouldn’t really be much overlap with S204. Moreover, by the time I was into the overlap period S283 would be into the biology half. Plus points on that are that it would get me the Certificate of Astronomy and Planetary Science and add to my planned chemistry cum physics degree. Downside is that it means dropping the option of doing the fossils and history of life course though presumably I’ll be covering that material in the evolution course in 2013/2014. I’d also be running it alongside the microbes course (S171) though I can string that out ’til April if need-be. Must see if I can get a quick look over the course materials tomorrow before doing anything drastic.

After a bit of arm twisting I managed to persuade Wendy to take up both an English and a maths class at school.

Although the primary school has organised them basically so that the parents attending can in turn help their children with the homework over the coming years, they’re at a much higher level than the kids will reach in that school with the highest level currently on offer going to GCSE equivalent. The Essential Skills classes that they’re doing come in two levels with the first starting at a very low level and it’s only the second level that gets to GCSE.

English was the most popular class going by those signing up for it last week and Wendy reckoned that there was a fairly full turnout this morning. She also reckons that there’ll be quite a dropout over the next few weeks as, by the sound of it, a fair number of those attending weren’t expecting to actually have to do much thinking. Having said that, high drop out rates are par for the course for open-entry courses with 40% being quite typical. That might seem like quite a high rate but there are all kinds of reasons for it and more than most apply to this course: there was little information in advance about course content, it’s open-entry and there was a lot of peer pressure to sign up.

The little information about the course meant that people could easily have expectations about the course which were wildly out of line from what it actually covers. For the English course, that probably means that a number of people will be expecting to read novels for the course but it’s a course about the language rather than the literature so they’ll not be reading novels at all. Being open-entry means that people who’ve had little or no effective schooling will be there along with those who’ve had quite a lot of effective schooling and that’s already causing problems with a small group who never learned that they need to keep quiet in class and particularly so when the teacher is interacting with another student. Finally, the peer pressure means that some people are there who don’t really want to be which will be causing problems too.

Worst of all though she’s got homework so that’s three lots of homework that I’ll need to check now?!?!?!

Now that I’ve realised that I can use some of the short courses to bulk up the life sciences degree to the 360 points, it opens up a whole range of options for the October to June slot for the next two or three years.

Since it’s now basically a free choice in October I could include the World Archaeology course which I’ve been wanting to do for a while now and with its new November start date it’s looking very doable.

A second series of options relate to the psychology degree. I’d been planning on skipping level one altogether for that but as I won’t finish it before 2015 I’ll have to include both Discovering Psychology (no exam) and Introducing Health Sciences (a life sciences course obviously). In fact, postponing S205 gives me both October 2011 and October 2012 as slots for those.

Finally, there’s Planetary science and the search for life which would complete my Certificate in Astronomy and Planetary Science.

I don’t need to decide between them ’til after Easter which is handy as it’ll give me enough time to see how the certificate in web applications courses run alongside larger courses. At the moment I think my front runner would be the world archaeology course probably followed by the planetary science one the following year.

In some ways I always expect that as the weather gets colder, the people running the ice cream vans would swap over to some kind of hot food van but they never do.

Once the summer is out of the way, both the ice cream vans and their hot food equivalents disappear until the following spring. Almost simultaneously too which is peculiar because they’re rarely in the same spots so don’t get the chance to say “is that you finished for this year?”. It’s also a bit daft as I’d have thought that most people would continue to buy from the hot food vans quite a while after it was a bit too cool for ice cream.

Just where do they go over the winter though? Aside from one, somewhat knackered, old hot dog trailer, I’ve not seen either an ice cream van nor a hot food one parked anywhere. I suppose they could migrate south for the winter but given the relative lack of fluency in foreign languages exhibited by their owners I don’t really rate them as migratory beasties.

Of course, perhaps since they’re so good at predicting when the winter will set in they’re all closet meteorologists?

Does anyone know the answer?

The Open University have an interesting type of degree called the “open” degree which is essentially a degree where you can plonk just about any combination of courses into subject only to it meeting the broad requirements of a degree. So, for example, you need to have 120 points at level 3 for an honours degree but those points could be made up of courses in, say, physics, history, English and art.

Since I’m basically aiming at a named degree I’d ignored anything to do with the open degrees. However, the other night it struck me that there’s a semi-open degree option available too in that my life sciences degree only requires me to have 300 points of life sciences subjects and the remaining 60 points can be any subject.

Ordinarily, that wouldn’t really matter to me but as I have to collect the life sciences degree no later than 2014 any help along the way to that is welcome. So I had a think about that. In fact by this time next year I should already have those 60 miscellaneous points accumulated in the form of my current astronomy course and part of the certificate in web applications. Of those two, the astronomy course forms part of what will, some day, become a physics cum chemistry degree but the web applications certificate (a total of 60 points) doesn’t have a proper home at the moment. So, if I find that doubling up on the courses is becoming a bit much I could transfer the web applications courses into the life sciences degree.

That option has a lot of appeal in that my original plan was to do the main chemistry course next year and use those 60 points but longer term that causes a problem in that I would ultimately need to acquire 60 more chemistry points for the chemistry degree. It also has the plus point that it doesn’t leave the web applications certificate just hanging there unattached to any particular degree.