Foreign Perspectives

The results are in a couple of days early as these things usually are.

A year ago I’d have laughed at anyone who’d have said I’d be going down the biology route to my science degree but it turned out that the human biology course was both fascinating and much more doable than I’d ever expected it to be. Fascinating in terms of all aspects of the course really as pretty much all of it was new to me. That newness was something I’d have expected to make the course somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible for me to do but in practice, whilst it was certainly hard going at the start, the fascination drove me on.

For a variety of reasons I’m embarking on my first “proper” biology course next February and, going by the extracts of the course texts that I’ve seen already, it looks like it will be a similar mix of fascinating and difficult. I’ll see how that mix pans out by Christmas next year when the results are in.

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.