Open University
I'm currently a student with the Open University, studying towards a degree in English Language and Literature.
Friday, December 28, 2007
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:)
These are the books I’ve ordered:
Monday, November 05, 2007
It’s 9.15pm and I’m only just home from work so whatever creative thing I do today it’s going to have be short and quick as I still need to have food - all I’ve eaten today is a sandwich and two sticks of shortbread (and I wonder why I’m so scrawny?!).
Anyway, I really, really want to get some quality reading in before bed which leaves very limited time for drawing...I’m thinking something silly and frivolous…
In other news I have officially registered for my next OU course. Consequently I’m feeling very poor and I shall probably break down and weep when I get my next credit card bill :(
And all for the sake of better grammar!
It also means that I’m going to have to get in as much drawing as possible between now and the end of January because come Feb 2 I’ll be hitting the books again and I strongly suspect that U211 is going to be a lot more demanding timewise than A103 was.
Music: ‘Thinking About Tomorrow’, Beth Orton
Sunday, October 14, 2007
After waiting four weeks for TMA08 to be returned I finally decided to e-mail my tutor to find out what was happening. Now, with the conferencing software the OU uses you can find out exactly if and when your message has been read. And no sooner was my message read than the TMA was finally returned via the eTMA system. Followed by a rather terse message from my tutor that it was now available for collection. I can only surmise that he forgot to do it in the first place. 30 days from submission to return! Colour me unimpressed!
But it’s back and while I won’t have officially passed the course until the course results come out in December I can now safely say that I have successfully cleared the first hurdle in what might eventually be a BA in English Language and Literature. That’s supposing nothing else comes along to distract me in the meantime;)
Music: ‘Great Waves’, The Dirty Three feat. Cat Power
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
...it is 18 days since my last eTMA*
and still no mark.
Hurry up, Mr Tutor Man, hurry up!
Some of us need to be put out of our misery already! It took four weeks (!) to get TMA07 back, but I had this strange idea that because TMA08 was the final one to be submitted electronically and extensions can only be granted in extremis that this one would come back a bit more promptly. But no sign of it yet, grrrrh! *stamps foot impatiently*
*electronic Tutor Marked Assignment
Listening to: ‘Corduroy’, Pearl Jam
Thursday, September 27, 2007
It’s been a stressful few weeks, all in all, for various reasons that I won’t bother to go into here. It has all impacted quite badly on the last two assignments for my OU course, especially TMA08. I haven’t got a result back for it yet, and given how long it took to get the mark for TMA07 back, I’m not holding my breath.
Read more...
Music: ‘Copied Keys’, Kathleen Edwards
Thursday, August 30, 2007
I first heard this poem on a BBC TV show called The Bookworm. Presented by Gryff Rhys Jones, it ran at tea time on Sunday afternoons on BBC1, from 1995 to 1997. This poem was featured on an edition filmed in Dublin. If memory serves, it was displayed on the electronic display at Dublin’s main train station much to the bemusement of the commuters. It remains a favourite.
Felicity in Turin
We met in the Valentino in Turin
And travelled down through Italy by train,
Sleeping together,
I do not mean having sex.
I mean sleeping together.
Of which sexuality is,
And is not, a part.
It is this sleeping together
That is sacred to me.
This yawning together.
You can have sex with anyone
But with whom can you sleep?
I hate you
Because having slept with me
You left me.
By Paul Durcan
From A Snail in My Prime: New and Selected Poems
In other news...
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Tonight I read right through to the end of my History of Science unit. This would be an example of how NOT to study. A103 is a 60 point course and therefore equivalent to half time study so each course unit is supposed to be approximate to one week’s worth of study (or 16 hours). That means that the two History units I covered yesterday were supposed to be covered over a period of two weeks. And tonight’s reading (which took less than 4 hours) should have been a week’s study.
How much of the material am I actually taking in? That’s debatable...
Music: ‘She’s My Baby’, Mazzy Star
Monday, August 27, 2007
Well, today I ploughed through Units 25 and 26 of my current OU Block, The Sixties: Mainstream Culture and Counter-Culture and can I just say now that the antipathy I felt towards Arthur Marwick during Block 3 has been fully reignited. Except that it’s worse now as thanks to the DVDs I watched at the end of Block 3 I now find myself reading the current unit with Marwick’s voice in my head! He is a truly horrible writer, full of needless interjections that consistently break the flow of his sentences.
As I’m very behind and short on time and TMA08 only requires to answer on three disciplines...
Music: ‘Choosing Life’, Philip Glass, The Hours OST
Saturday, August 25, 2007
“We are not retreating - we are advancing in another direction.”
Douglas MacArthur
Yes, I have finally come to a decision regarding my future Open University studies and that’s to take a break.
I have decided to do U211 Exploring the English Language in February. As discussed in a previous entry this is a new course and by waiting until then it will have gone through two presentations which should, fingers crossed, mean that a lot of the early teething problems have been ironed out. The plan is to follow it up with A210 Approaching Literature in Sept 08 which, if things are going well, I’ll overlap with E301 The Art of English, a level 3 English language course, starting Jan 09.
So what to do in the meantime?
Listening to: DVD audio commentary for Star Wars: A New Hope
Friday, August 24, 2007
I am finally starting Block 6 of my Open University course, weeks behind schedule. I should have started it on July 28 but life has rather got the better of me of late. Still better late than never! I have quite a bit of annual leave to take so I might book a week off in September and hopefully cover enough of the course work to make some sort of half decent attempt at my penultimate tutor marked assignment.
The final TMA (number 9) of the course is a different kettle of fish from the rest as it’s a timed affair...
Listening to: ‘There’s More To Life Than This’, Bjork
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