U211: Exploring the English Language
Sunday, February 24, 2008
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.
Read on for more TMA woes...
Sunday, February 10, 2008
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
Sunday, February 03, 2008
“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
Friday, January 25, 2008
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!
Saturday, December 29, 2007
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.
Read on..
Music: ‘Sing For Your Supper’, Cathy Davey
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
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...
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
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
I’m rapidly approaching the end of my first Open University course, A103, and am at the stage where I need to decide if I want to go on to do another course.
Currently I’m leaning towards a course called Exploring the English Language (U211). It’s brand new, currently in its first presentation and from what I can gather on its First Class OUSA forum, not without teething problems. In fact, comments on the forum have been overwhelmingly negative thus far. I had been 100% positive that this was the route I wanted to take but now I’m not so sure.
Read more
Listening to: ‘Flaming Red Hair”, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Complete Recordings
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