I'm currently a student with the Open University, studying towards a degree in English Language and Literature.
My exam date for U211 was announced on my student homepage today:
Tuesday 7 October 2008
It’s in the afternoon, a fact I’m very happy about - I am NOT a morning person!
Anyway back to trying to write a coherent answer to TMA02!
So after taking a study break on Easter Saturday and Sunday I hit the books again yesterday and promptly hit a wall. I sat and read the same page at least five times and barely took in a word. I tried reading really slowly but to no avail. My concentration had gone awol and my mind was flitting unproductively all over the place - what should I have for dinner...oooh Battlestar Galactica’s back in only two weeks...mmmn still some Easter Eggs left, wouldn’t hurt to have a little more chocolate...you get the point.
Music: ‘I Feel It All’, Feist
I have just received my grade for my first U211 assignment.
98%
To say that I’m stunned and shocked and delighted would be quite the understatement!
I can’t quite believe it.
I’m going to be insufferably arrogant for the rest of the day. Luckily I’m home alone today so I can inflict it only on myself ;)
Back to panicking about TMA02 tomorrow.
Music: ‘Hard Sun’, Eddie Vedder
I got the second part of my TMA finished tonight about an hour before the deadline- cutting it fine as ever.
It’s a bit of mess, I can see all omissions that are going to cost me marks but as usual time is my enemy. It’s been such a long, eventful week that I didn’t get nearly as much time to work on the assignment as I would have liked and having to work late on Saturday night didn’t help.
For the second part of the assignment I had to write a response to another participant’s essay. I didn’t even get around to choosing one until after work late Saturday night, leaving me with only Sunday to do some research. And as libraries aren’t opened on Sundays I had to rely on the internet alone. I think I need to enroll in a course on being more organised!
I did enjoy a tiny moment triumph when I had a Balderdash and Piffle moment.
Music: ‘Going Home’, Jon Allen
I have just completed the first part of my first TMA for u211. Right now I"m all butterflies and nerves. I feel like I’ve made a decent* attempt but not a brilliant one. Time got away on me, again, and thanks to a fairly mental week at work I got very little done in advance. Which meant that I spent most of today (well from around 2pm to 11.30pm) trying to write a short essay. I really should not be allowing myself to get stressed over 600 words. Yes, you read that right, 600 words.
The first part of the TMA asks you to perform a mini-investigation into a word or phrase of your choice, from either a local dialect, or an existing word that has taken on a new context (think of a word like mouse - a mammal but also now a computer peripheral) and the final option, which is the one I did, an obsolete or archaic word. You would think that 600 words would be ample room to discuss one little word but when you try to relate it to your course materials those words start to run out fast.
My new course is proving very time-demanding hence the lack of blogging. So far I’m enjoying the studying. Unit 1 looked at varieties of ‘Englishes’ (’English’ English, Scots English, Franglais, etc) and at the global influence of English both as a mother tongue and as a second and foreign language.
Unit 2, which is the one I’m currently working on, looks at the origins of the language, from its fifth century beginnings with the Anglo Saxon invasion of Britain, through to the Norman Conquest and the subsequent emergence of Middle English. And I’m loving the history side again just like in my last course. Read on...
Music: ‘The Tales That Really Matter’, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Complete Recordings
“The snow falls, and yes, the hand stretched into the
flakes’ path is a hand asking back a season now lost.”
Nadeem Aslam, Maps for Lost Lovers
This week:
This photo by persistingstars made me inexplicably happy.
I saw a fantastic production of The Taming of the Shrew
I watched a lovely documentary about Arctic Wolves. I had been following the film makers’ diary on the BBC website last year so it was great to finally see the playful Lucy in action.
Above: an Arctic wolf, image © Mark Smith
Am reading The Historian, a novel about some scholars researching the legend of Dracula and discovering it’s more than mere legend. It has helped provoked all sorts of odd dreams that I’ve been having almost on a nightly basis involving schorlarly research, vampires, the cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and of course wolves.
Watched some art journalling vids by the lovely and informative Kira
I had to miss the first tutorial for my new course due to the snow, heavy frost and gales we had over the weekend. Bit bummed out about that. But I’ve made a good start on the course work and am spending today compiling definitions for the glossary words I need to learn for this Unit.
The glossary is a big part of the course. When October rolls around and I have to do my exam the first question (worth 20% of the marks) will present me with a choice of six terms, four of which I must be able to define, hence if I know my glossary words off by heart it should guarantee a good start in my exam. There’s only (!) about 250 terms that I need to familiarise myself with over the course of the next nine months. So no worries there then!
Music: ‘Cross Bones Style’, Cat Power
The above picture represents a substantial chunk of my life for the next nine months. These are the course materials for my next OU course, U211 Exploring The English Language, which officially starts a week from tomorrow.
According to the course overview…
“U211 is a 60-pont, second level undergraduate course requiring approximately 600 hours of study, as follows:
course-directed study - 440 hours
self-directed study - 120 hours
studentship - 40 hours
Phew! When you see it broken down like that it seems like A LOT!
Urgh! So my next OU course, Exploring the English Language, starts in a month and I’m trying to brush up on my slipshod grammar. It’s proving a somewhat painful process. I wish that I had been taught all this at school but unfortunately I grew up in a period when teaching grammar was out of vogue.
It’s not that I think that I have an especially poor grasp of grammar, like most native speakers, I have an intuitive sense of what sounds right. It’s more that I feel that I lack the terminology to describe language appropriately and I’m sure that having a better grasp of it will help me in my upcoming TMAs which, after all, are all about understanding language.
Music: ‘Sing For Your Supper’, Cathy Davey
About a month ago I decided to try and enforce a no-buying-new-books policy until I had made a concerted assault on the quite frankly staggering amount of unread books I currently own. I, of course, broke it almost immediately by buying a copy of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf but I’ve been very good ever since. Until yesterday that is. Amazon have a 3 for 2 offer on Oxford World Classics at the moment and as several of the set texts for a couple of my intended OU courses are included I decided to go ahead and order some. It seems a little weird to be ordering books for courses I won’t be starting until 2009/2010 but a bargain’s a bargain so what the hell! I’ll be prepared if nothing else:)
"Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling." G.K. Chesterson
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