Bad Faery

Saturday, August 25, 2007

Decisions, decisions…

“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? 

Since I know what Literature courses I want to do I’m going to start reading some of the set texts. There’s quite few I’ve read before but most of them ages and ages ago, and for pleasure not study, something which requires a different style of reading.

I’ve also discovered Learning Space, a section on the OU website, open to both OU and non-OU students alike, that gives access to course materials from a selection of courses. It provides the opportunity to work through a course unit from individual courses. In OU terms a unit is approximate to one week of study, i.e. not more than 16 hours, though some of the units available on Learning Space are considerably shorter than that. There are several Literature units available from level 1 courses such as A175 Start Writing Poetry as well as a couple from the Level 2 course I want to do, A210 Approaching Literature.

Another area I need to tackle is grammar, particularly as I want to do two English language courses. I’m from that generation that didn’t get taught grammar at school and it’s something I’ve always felt I’ve missed out on. So that’s my winter - beginner’s English Grammar and lots of classic novels!

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