2 modules complete, and I need a rest!
I honestly hadn't reckoned on how much this extra study was going to take out of my reserves of (a) patience (b) energy and (c) general goodwill towards men. And women. I'm really rather tired and in need of a holiday.
But only 4 left to do. I'm a third of the way through, which is worth celebrating I think!
The good news is that I have managed to sort out a school placement at The Wensleydale School in Leyburn, which is about 10 minutes from Kindergarten. This a great, as my plan C was to go to James's school - not ideal when you consider a Jocelyn thrown in to the mix, although it would have been lovely to spend the week with my family.
More good news: I have had my holiday cleared from work to attend this 5 day placement and also for my 2 weeks at University starting on 25th June, AND I still have some left in the bag to take before I leave work on 31st July. Yay! Things are looking good.
I will endeavour to get started with module 3 tonight. It's all about trends in the periodic table so it's not too complicated but it can be a little confusing if you don't get the facts right to start with. I have managed an 80% plus score so far, which qualifies me to A-Level standard, so it will be nice if I can manage not to let the standard slip. I suppose I'll just have to muster up some energy from somewhere, get my head down and keep on trucking.
Oh, the best news of all is that I've hired a cleaner. Well, two actually, who will come to deliver me from dust-related torment on Thursday afternoon. If I pay them extra they'll even do my ironing and change the bedlinen. Bliss!
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
One down, five to go
Module 1 complete! Yay!
It's been a really long time since I last posted, which just goes to show how hard I've been working, honest! I have managed to log 51.5 hours of study for module 1 with hardly any 'creativity' on the timesheet I have to keep. It's been a bit of a slog but nowhere near as difficult as I thought it was going to be despite the amount of information I have already written down in my enormous ringbinder file.
The videos, as I said before, are more like study guides with a few interesting gems of knowledge thrown in, more like pointers to the kinds of things I should be reading about. I have 2 main textbooks to learn from; one A-Level and one more complicated and a lot fatter, so when I have topic I don't know anything about, I start in the GCSE textbook (Muppetry for Beginners), then move on to the A-Level textbook (Chemistry for Dummies) and then on to the complicated one (Really Difficult Chemistry for Clever People). So far I have discovered that A-Level chemistry isn't really all that hard.
I sometimes wonder why I found it so complicated at school, and then I remember my awful teacher (Mr Hart...he of the comb-over, grey moth-eaten slacks and nasty, nasty grey squeaky shoes) and suddenly I realise why. Bad teachers really do have a lot to answer for.
I have had to submit 3 assignments for this course. The first was the timesheet. Not too difficult, I'm pretty sure anyone can put one of those together. The second was a 'Module Reflection' - a side of A4 detailing how I think my progress has...er...progressed and what lessons I have learned to make me a better student for the next module. The third one - the Module Summary - was more tricky as I had to summarise the whole module and include key points/diagrams/pictures in a way which will be useful to me in the future. I chose to do a powerpoint presentation (no more than 15 slides allowed) and divide my key learning topics between them. This sounds pretty easy, but it's not, mainly because there's only so much information you can include on a slide whilst keeping it interesting. It took at least 2 full days to do and has been the most difficult thing I have had to produce. All these three are marked on a pass/fail basis. If I've failed any, I really need to have a re-think about my future career and perhaps go into underwater basket weaving instead. Or puppies. I could manage puppies.
I also had an online assessment to complete, which is timed. You get to take this twice for each module - once half way through to get an idea of which areas you need to work on, and once at the end, which is the final % mark (40 for GCSE, 60 for AS and 80 for A-Level). I got 39% on the first try and 89% one the second try.
This sounds like a pretty good improvement until you realise that you get the same set of 9 questions for each take. And by that I mean positively, entirely, exactly the same. So why didn't I get 100% ? Well, I still don't know why I got the first calculation wrong, but (a) who cares, and (b) I'm blaming the person who wrote the test for marking up the wrong answer as correct. Which ever way I worked the calculation, I always got the same answer. Therefore I'm right, they're wrong. End of.
Along the way of improving myself I identified my maths as being a weak point, mainly because I had to identify something to improve on and there were plenty of handy maths worksheets available for download. So I decided to try some 'maths for chemists' problems. And try as I might, I still can't get to grips with simultaneous equations, dividing fractions by fractions and how the devil you translate a square root into a real number by mucking about with algebra. I may have to pay a visit to my dear sister (or my really clever nieces) to find out the answers, but it's not on the chemistry syllabus so it can most definitely wait for another day. Hurray!
So now it's on to module 2 - thermodynamics, Hess's law (I'm assuming not Rudolph Hess?) and all that jazz to do with enthalpy changes, things with triangles in front of them (sorry, Delta signs, to indicate a change in something), lots of graphs and probability distributions and other fun ways of predicting whether something reacts with something else. This is useful when you're an alchemist because it may just save you from getting your hands burned off because you decided to wash the oil off the sodium in the bath...
Remembering, of course, that energy cannot be created or destroyed, just transformed, I will take the energy offered by a tall, iced gin and tonic and transform it into the energy required to remember lots of useful information to be imparted to the next generation of chemists. Now that's chemistry.
It's been a really long time since I last posted, which just goes to show how hard I've been working, honest! I have managed to log 51.5 hours of study for module 1 with hardly any 'creativity' on the timesheet I have to keep. It's been a bit of a slog but nowhere near as difficult as I thought it was going to be despite the amount of information I have already written down in my enormous ringbinder file.
The videos, as I said before, are more like study guides with a few interesting gems of knowledge thrown in, more like pointers to the kinds of things I should be reading about. I have 2 main textbooks to learn from; one A-Level and one more complicated and a lot fatter, so when I have topic I don't know anything about, I start in the GCSE textbook (Muppetry for Beginners), then move on to the A-Level textbook (Chemistry for Dummies) and then on to the complicated one (Really Difficult Chemistry for Clever People). So far I have discovered that A-Level chemistry isn't really all that hard.
I sometimes wonder why I found it so complicated at school, and then I remember my awful teacher (Mr Hart...he of the comb-over, grey moth-eaten slacks and nasty, nasty grey squeaky shoes) and suddenly I realise why. Bad teachers really do have a lot to answer for.
I have had to submit 3 assignments for this course. The first was the timesheet. Not too difficult, I'm pretty sure anyone can put one of those together. The second was a 'Module Reflection' - a side of A4 detailing how I think my progress has...er...progressed and what lessons I have learned to make me a better student for the next module. The third one - the Module Summary - was more tricky as I had to summarise the whole module and include key points/diagrams/pictures in a way which will be useful to me in the future. I chose to do a powerpoint presentation (no more than 15 slides allowed) and divide my key learning topics between them. This sounds pretty easy, but it's not, mainly because there's only so much information you can include on a slide whilst keeping it interesting. It took at least 2 full days to do and has been the most difficult thing I have had to produce. All these three are marked on a pass/fail basis. If I've failed any, I really need to have a re-think about my future career and perhaps go into underwater basket weaving instead. Or puppies. I could manage puppies.
I also had an online assessment to complete, which is timed. You get to take this twice for each module - once half way through to get an idea of which areas you need to work on, and once at the end, which is the final % mark (40 for GCSE, 60 for AS and 80 for A-Level). I got 39% on the first try and 89% one the second try.
This sounds like a pretty good improvement until you realise that you get the same set of 9 questions for each take. And by that I mean positively, entirely, exactly the same. So why didn't I get 100% ? Well, I still don't know why I got the first calculation wrong, but (a) who cares, and (b) I'm blaming the person who wrote the test for marking up the wrong answer as correct. Which ever way I worked the calculation, I always got the same answer. Therefore I'm right, they're wrong. End of.
Along the way of improving myself I identified my maths as being a weak point, mainly because I had to identify something to improve on and there were plenty of handy maths worksheets available for download. So I decided to try some 'maths for chemists' problems. And try as I might, I still can't get to grips with simultaneous equations, dividing fractions by fractions and how the devil you translate a square root into a real number by mucking about with algebra. I may have to pay a visit to my dear sister (or my really clever nieces) to find out the answers, but it's not on the chemistry syllabus so it can most definitely wait for another day. Hurray!
So now it's on to module 2 - thermodynamics, Hess's law (I'm assuming not Rudolph Hess?) and all that jazz to do with enthalpy changes, things with triangles in front of them (sorry, Delta signs, to indicate a change in something), lots of graphs and probability distributions and other fun ways of predicting whether something reacts with something else. This is useful when you're an alchemist because it may just save you from getting your hands burned off because you decided to wash the oil off the sodium in the bath...
Remembering, of course, that energy cannot be created or destroyed, just transformed, I will take the energy offered by a tall, iced gin and tonic and transform it into the energy required to remember lots of useful information to be imparted to the next generation of chemists. Now that's chemistry.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)