Foreign Perspectives

Disappointingly we’ve been the only parents who’ve been there during the football coaching sessions this week but we’ve been well rewarded with a week long series of excellent football skills by everyone from the 6 year olds through to the 10 year olds taking part.

Our little guy has really taken to the game and managed to clock up 6 goals in one of the matches and he’s been picking up various prizes during the week with at least three trophies to be picked up this afternoon including both individual and team wins. Unfortunately, his big brother doesn’t seem to have accumulated quite so many so there’s a bit of disappointment in store when they start comparing trophy counts. We’re not sure how many are coming their way as there were just an amazing number of opportunities to pick things up during the course of the week and there’s a final tournament this morning before the prize giving in the afternoon.

The weather has been almost perfect for the week so far with just the right mix of cloud and sun so that nobody collapsed with heatstroke nor were we freezing. Supposedly it’s going to be pouring today so they’re relocating to the gym.

I finally got around to making a start on the ECA this morning and, surprisingly, have all three of the short questions finished.

I say surprisingly because when I first looked at them as I was travelling home from the course they looked more like long questions than short ones. I’ll not say a whole lot about them as the second two groups haven’t seen them yet but they’re basically variants of questions that have already been asked during the three themes of the course which I guess is as you’d expect. I only needed to look up one thing in the theme briefing notes which, hopefully, goes to show that I was paying attention during the week.

Next up is the write-up of the experiment. In principle that’s fairly easy but they’ve individual word counts for each section of the write-up which makes it harder. Some of those seem very tight too eg the maximum of 10 words for the title.

All being well, I’m hoping to get a complete first draft of everything tomorrow which is pretty good and will take away my excuse for putting off the astronomy assignment.

We’ve had a Decathlon card since our time living in France but since we’re into our second year back here we’ve obviously not used it for a while. Almost two years in fact.

Anyway, Belfast happens to be one of the first places that Decathlon has opened a UK store so we thought we’d pop in. It’s very much a French Decathlon that happens to be in Belfast with seemingly all the same products and even the very same trollies which, of course, can’t be used as they need a euro in them rather than a pound. Even the prices seem much the same which makes it one of the more expensive stores around unless you pick something up on one of their 60%+ off opening offers.

Amazingly it’s even French to the point of being able to use my French Decathlon card which is a level of internationalisation that’s very, very rarely seen which is quite a surprise. The website isn’t 100% in English yet but I managed to change the address of the card to here which is also something that’s rarely considered when a company goes international.

Barring more changes from the OU (always possible these days), I’m pretty much settled on doing the main biology course (S204) along with the plants summer school (SXR375) next year.

However, that leaves a few options in terms of short courses that would be nice to fit in around those and in preparation for the plants and chemistry courses. What I don’t want to do is to finish up with the TMA overload that happened  in March this year!

I figure that the plants short course would be nice preparation for the residential as I gather that I may not have reached the plants section of S204 before starting the residential. Similarly, it seems like an idea to get my chemistry back up to speed by way of the chemistry short course before I start on the main chemistry course in October next year. The game plan for both of those is to go for the lower workload rate so there’d be five months to do each of them. Sadly that means that I’d not be able to fit in the fossils course which is on its last run this November and sounds both easy and really interesting.

The disco last night took it’s toll on several people although surprisingly everyone in our group was in by 9.10am.

The final session on plants was the session with by far the most scientific feel about it as we were using all kinds of different techniques and equipment with it. Very much the culmination to the week in every way.

What we were doing was comparing the response of chlorophyll to various types and levels of light. To do that we first had to obtain the chlorophyll which started life as spinach from the local Tesco. We converted this to a liquid by way of mixing with assorted liquids and centrifuging the mixtures. Measurements were taken via a colorimeter after exposing a number of poisoned samples to the various types and levels of light for up to 3 minutes. As usual with the plant experiments this one didn’t produce the perfect results that you might expect but we not only looked the part but felt like scientists for this one.

Lunch was a little complicated as my usual addition to the meal of a couple of bottles of water wasn’t a runner when I was off to the plane so instead sweeties for the kids needed to be used to reach the magical £7. We’d a somewhat hurried lunch as the final lecture was to start as soon as we’d all sat down in the lecture theatre (yeah, we could all have gone down the take-away route, but nobody thought of it!).

The wind-down lecture concentrated on the ECA for the course which was handed out to us at the end. As expected it’s a write-up of one of the experiments (I’m going for the differences in respiration rate of brain and skin from Wednesday morning) and one short question from each of the themes. Well, they are titled short but some of them look relatively long to me but I’ve done little more than glance at them so who knows. Some of them look a little scary at the moment but then a lot of TMA questions can look scary at first glance.

Quite why they don’t hand the ECA out in advance is something of a mystery. We all knew that there was going to be a research write-up plus three questions before this week. Similarly we knew that we’d have to choose one of the nine possible experiments or rather eight as there’s one that doesn’t really work as a write-up. Likewise we knew that there’d be a short question on each theme and, really, it wouldn’t matter for the week if you did know what they were (I’m not going to say though or I’ll get told off… again).

Unsurprisingly we didn’t use Practical Biology today so we’ve all been lugging it around all week for nothing. I don’t even think that it’ll be needed for the ECA either. More annoyingly, some people appear to have incurred excess baggage charges thanks to bringing it along (as would I had BMIBaby weighed the case).

Useful to know is that Lenton Cabs (0115 9 781 781) only charge students £19 for the airport run vs the £35 of the airport taxis (and, yes, they can pick up from the airport for the same charge). Oh well, something to bear in mind when I’m doing the level 3 residential next year.

On that level 3 residential, it would appear that the majority of people are doing both of them next year rather than splitting them between 2011 and 2012. The reasoning for most seems to be that since 2012 will be the final year there’ll be a combination of a winding down feel in 2012 and a very high chance of the courses filling up extremely early. In terms of recommended pre-requisites, SXR375 (the plants one) requires S204 so that’s OK for me in 2011 but SXR376 (the human disease one) requires S320 or S377 which I can’t do ’til 2012 so that’s the best year for the second residential for me.

As usual, post-residential I’m exhausted.