Foreign Perspectives

Although my plan was to leave starting this one ’til October, I couldn’t resist taking a little peek at it last night.

It feels very much like the part of the chemistry A-level I did which covered the practical applications of  chemistry. Just as that drew me into chemistry back then, so too it did last night and I found my “little peek” being enough to finish the first chapter.

That first chapter covers quite a bit of ground running from the very basics of atoms and molecules right up to the structure of the alkanes. Quite a leap if you’ve not done chemistry before but many bits of it came back to me.

The second chapter which I’ve almost completed scouts around the development of aspirin, using it to introduce a number of chemistry concepts as it goes along. I’d say that it would be moving at a fair pace if you’d not encountered any of this before and even for me it was starting to introduce quite complex ideas towards the end.

Somehow I suspect that I’ll be finishing this well ahead of my original timetable of pre-Christmas although there are a couple of TMAs for other courses that need doing over the next couple of weeks so I’ll mainly be looking at this in the evenings.

With my Mum being over 83 now she’s acquired a social worker as I guess do a lot of older people these days.

In some ways that’s handy as it’s given us access to a day care centre which lets her get out to socialise with people around her own age. That’s a good thing as what happened over the previous decades was that with Dad going out the majority of the friends that “they” acquired over that time were actually his friends which accentuated the problem of the increasing age of the friends even more.

However, where it’s not so nice is the sheer level of what seems like interference in the life of the family that having a social worker entails. Hardly a week goes by when Elizabeth isn’t calling in for something or other or rather tries to call in as we’re out quite a lot. That being out doesn’t go down too well as there seems to be the assumption that you’ll be there when the social worker calls, regardless of when they call.

The level of interference seems sure to go up a notch thanks to them pushing for Mum to be declared mentally incompetent. Now, I’ll grant that Mum’s mind isn’t what it was ten years back and indeed she moves around a lot more slowly too but, frankly, I think that having her declared mentally incompetent by a court is totally over the top. What it actually means is that Social Services get to review all of her finances and spending which seems to me to be incredibly interfering. Moreover, I’m supposed to keep her in the house or go everywhere with her. Thus, her regular walks to the shops would have to stop “in case she gets lost”. OK, I imagine the day will come when she will get lost on her way to or from the shops but that day isn’t here yet and putting her under what’s effectively house arrest seems far from reasonable.

Overall, I’d say that they’re not such a good thing at all. So far the only point in their favour is that they’ve organised getting her into a day centre but we’d have managed that independently if need be and any plus points are far outweighed by the interference.

Way back in May we had the idea of giving the Kumon a bit of a boost over the summer months. After all, the kids wouldn’t be tired after a day at school and we’d have more time to fit in the work. So, we added the other subject for each of them. Thus, James started maths and John started English.

What we hadn’t allowed for was that although they’d not be at school all day, they’d be tired out from doing holiday things. So rather than plugging away with ten pages of each subject they’ve mostly been doing five of each with perhaps a few weeks at the full rate on one of the subjects.

Despite that slower pace, both of them have made quite a bit of progress over the summer months. John is still ploughing on with 100% marks on his maths and, after a slow start, has just about completed a level in the English. James has continued to pick up speed on the English and is getting into the swing of the maths too.

Now we have the problem as to what to do when they restart school. We could continue on with both subjects but somehow I don’t think that’ll work too well when they’ve school homeworks to contend with as well. What we’re going to do is to continue on into September and see how it goes before deciding what to do over the remainder of the school year.

Although this is only one of the short courses it’s one of my key ones as I’m using it as a trial to see if I can remember any of my A-level chemistry from years ago. Moreover, it’s a kind of bridging course with mostly chemistry but bits of biology too.

It’s my very first course with one of the famous Open University “kits”, in this case a little kit to build models of molecules. It looks like it’ll be a lot of fun so I’ve hidden it from the kids. Aside from that there’s the usual check list and course text plus a couple of audio CDs which supposedly no longer included with this course.

The plan is that I put this to the one side and don’t look at it ’til I’ve the astronomy exam out of the way but I suspect that I’ll have a peek at it before then. For sure I need to get the three remaining TMAs out of the way first though as two are due in a few weeks time and the other way too close to the astronomy exam to even think about not doing it now.

Somehow or other I seem to have almost completed reading through the course books for S103 and have just started into the final one for now which is on fossils and geology generally. Surprisingly I’m finding it very interesting and it has me thinking about going for the final run of the fossils short course over Christmas.

One thing that you don’t see too much of are online schools or at least those of the children type schools as, of course, there are untold numbers of management schools around.

For a whole bunch of reasons we’d be quite interested were there to be a truly workable online school but, so far, their remit seems to be confined to university level schools. Quite why that is, is presumably down to the relatively low numbers of parents who go in for home schooling as one assumes that they’d be amongst the first group to give online schooling a go for their children.

Oh well, perhaps one day such a thing will turn up.