Taxpayers beware

I'm officially a student! Lessons start this afternoon and I'm pretty scared.... First school placement in three weeks time.

Heres a pic of the university just to prove I'm here!




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Practicals

Some fun chemicals. If I can work out how to get the picture up!

I'm currently in the second week at Sussex University doing the last module of the course which is two weeks of easy practicals and not much work to do. All I have left after here is one weekend of writing up then I'm finished! Hurray!



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One more home study module to push

For those that don't know, I just scored 100% in module 4. I have already given myself a large pat on the back for being brilliant.

I spent last week at The Wensleydale School in Leyburn, near Catterick, doing my 5 day secondary school observation period. Far from being frightened off, I had a really lovely time getting involved in the lessons - I even taught a little bit - and getting to know the kids and teachers.

I was struck by 3 things:
1) Kids are pretty thick and wear too many accessories
2) I have a great deal more knowledge than your average science teacher (unless we're talking physics, in which case I am also a thicko)
3) Having a biology degree too makes me more versatile and hence more employable .....to all you posh schools with horses and swimming pools.....PICK ME!

I also noticed that amost nothing I have learned in my course so far was included in the GCSE syllabus that the school was using, and that basically the teachers wing it on a daily basis. It sounds perfect!

So I have now completed 4 out of 6 modules, with the last being taught at university over a 2 week period. This means that I only have 1 more module to complete at home before 22nd June, so if I'm good and work hard then I can have a week or two off before I have to travel to Sussex to finish it off. All my course feedback so far has been excellent (naturally) and I've been enjoying it - not the late nights and weekend study, but in general the subject has been interesting and straightforward.

That is until now....organic chemistry is the one thing I remember from A-level as being really complicated and I have a stack of print-outs about 2 inches high, which is about double a normal module. But still, I can't see that I can possibly fail now...can I?!

Mostly I just can't wait to have a weekend off with nothing to do. My cleaners have been a real boost and my husband has been making himself very useful in the kitchen (he even washed my car for me - what a saint!) yet I still find I am running around like a headless chicken with very little free time. This is not only due to the coursework, but also because we have been spending Saturdays driving around choosing things to go in our new house, like floors and bathrooms. I think we have about 12 samples of engineered oak flooring in the dining room in different shades and textures, along with as many catalogues for kitchens, bathrooms, log burners, doors, door furniture (snigger) etc, but we're nearly finished. I think it will be tiles next. And then paint. Ugh.

I have, however, treated myself to a few presents with my bursary money:
1) A new watch (I changed the battery in the last one and the back wouldn't stay on and I had to use superglue, but then I have had it for 10 years)
2) Some shoes (for summertime at work)
3) Some new clothes (ditto)
4) A pair of limited edition GHD straighteners in red (beautiful and practical).

All in all I've done pretty well. Now all I have to do is shed the 1/2 stone I've put on through not doing much exercise and eating chocolate (who says study is all bad?!) in time for Richard's wedding. But with all the free time I'm just about to have, that shouldn't be too hard. Not as hard as learning chemistry anyway.

Cripes....

....I can't actually believe that it's been two weeks since I last posted on here. I've completed module 3 with 95% (but the test was very, very easy) and have broken the back of the home study modules with only two left to do before my two weeks at university.

One of the stranger things I have to write at the end of each module is called a 'Reflection', in which I have a side of A4 to review the results of the various tests I have to take and compare them at the start and finish of each module, and 'reflect' up on my learning style and studying ability. It's the last part that I have had trouble with...I spent 4 years at university studying, and aside from a few minor (rather obvious) suggestions such as making sure I set aside time when I won't be disturbed, writing crib cards etc, I'm pretty sure that my study technique is top notch (cue sound of one blowing one's trumpet).

For my last 'reflection' I wrote about trying to think more about my thought processes while I am learning, to try to capture them on paper and simplify them so that another person could read my notes and come to the same conclusions that I did.

Now....does anyone have any ideas for what I can put in the next two 'reflections'? I feel I'm scraping the barrel here and have all but run out of ideas. 3 sets of 2 'study targets' needed please.

Module 4 is all about kinetics and equilibria, which means maths with a little bit of physics thrown in. I don't think I'm going to like this one very much and my calculator has been enjoying his rest at the bottom of my 'school bag'. I have a large pile of powerpoint notes to use in conjunction with my video study - the size of which is already depressing me despite the fact that I print them off for free at work. No hang on, that actually does make me feel a little bit better. Free stuff does cheer one up somewhat.

I have also been busy picking doors and handles and a kitchen and flooring and all sorts for the new house. I swear that Darryl never stops working. He is also a complete slave driver, so if anyone wants to pick a wood burning stove plus fire surround plus mantelpiece plus tiles for the utility room floor plus tiles for a kitchen splashback and some carpets and kitchen flooring and what colour render and.....and breathe......then please do. Really. Do.

2 down...and sleep...

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!

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.

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.