Enthalpy, anyone?

The distance learning course went live on Monday morning!

I watched my first video on Tuesday night and my second on Wednesday. So far I have managed to log around 8 hours (out of 50 for this module) of study over 3 days, which is better than I had imagined at the start. It is very interesting (thankfully) but there is a lot to learn. And when I say a lot, I really mean it. There are things in there that I didn't know about when I was doing my A-level, like quarks, electronic spin, electron sub-levels and probability curves (calculated using the Schrodinger equation, for those mathletes out there. And here was me thinking that Schrodinger was all about cats in boxes).

As you can probably imagine, my bed times have been getting later and later and getting out of bed has become a lot harder. I would normally manage to find the time for a lunchtime jog, but that's gone out of the window as well in favour of 30 minutes of doing nothing in the sunshine while I give my brain time to digest everything that has been going on.

Thankfully work has not been too busy for me and I am managing to keep my books on my desk to dip in to whenever there is a lull. But my lovely boss is leaving me today and I don't know who is replacing him, so whoever it is, I hope they are as relaxed about me studying at work as he is!

As for this 5 days in school thing. Well. The school I wanted to go to (next to Jocelyn's pre-school) mucked me about for a few weeks before declining my request yesterday. I phoned the next nearest school (about 15 minutes from pre-school)) yesterday but so far have heard nothing. I remain hopeful, but James and Clare, I may need your help! Not least with attending one of your schools, but also with childcare for Jocelyn for 5 days. How would you rate my chances? I have to do it otherwise they won't let me into the University in September.

The best news of all is that I only have to get 40% across the board to pass this course - which gets me to GCSE level Chemistry, although I would ideally like to get 60 or 80%, which are the AS and A level boundaries. The online assessments are also very generous - you get 10 minutes to answer each multiple choice question, leaving a moderate amount of time to check details in textbooks.

It's a strange course. The videos are more like guides to how the subject should be broken down when taught, rather than imparting much useful knowledge. The knowledge has to be picked from textbooks - of which I have plenty - which suits my current time distribution down to the ground and allows me to read and re-read, and re-read all the things that I have never heard of before. But even more strangely, the only thing they didn't make available for download is a copy of the periodic table, which is rather fundamental. And you would be amazed at how many of my textbooks have omitted a usefully large and informative copy as well.

Anyway, I can't stay around all day blogging at you lot. I have work to do. Sigh.

The books have started to arrive

I ordered all my recommended course textbooks from Amazon this week. Thankfully Amazon also sell second hand books, so I managed to save myself a great deal of money on the 11 textbooks I am expected to own. Yes, 11 books to read. I expect that instead of writing this blog, I will be spending my afternoons reading and trying to absorb facts that I haven't re-visited for the best part of 14 years. Crikey. I'm not entirely sure I understood it all back then, so this is going to be a fun and probably very steep re-learning curve! And all in the interests of creating a future generation of interested scientists. Children today (or in a couple of years time anyway) have never had it so good...

The titles of these books range from the mundane (Advanced Chemistry For You) to the bizarre (Molecules at an Exhibition: Portraits of Intriguing Materials in Everyday Life). So if anyone is desperate to learn about Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements, please let me know.

Hooray!

Hooray! I'm actually properly loaded onto the distance learning course, start date end of March/beginning of April, and have finally managed to contact the head of science at the secondary school next to Jocelyn's nursery for my 5 day placement. She has OFSTED next week but promises to help me after that.

Things are looking good.