I went down to old house yesterday and did some more clearing – brought back yet more stuff to litter this house with 🙁 Actually, I am hoping to be offloading some stuff that we don’t want any more, but I’ll put that in another post.
After I’d cleared our bedroom pretty much, and stacked more rubbish in a corner, I loaded up the car and then dropped in on my mother for a cup of tea. Stopped for quite a while chatting – lots of the conversation was about Katrin, which I found particularly difficult having just had a really good crying bout when I found the last birthday card she sent me – which is also the last birthday card she will ever send me.
Today I’ve mainly loafed. I helped the children tidy their rooms – which mainly consisted of telling Big to go back up and do the next step, and actually going up to Small’s and moving things around for him. I got extremely frustrated when I discovered that he was sitting behind me getting the things out that I’d just put away :/ After a very pleasant lunch, the children shot off upstairs to play, and Tim and I indulged in a game of golf on the Wii (which for a change, I won 🙂 ). There has also been some scrabulousing, extra washing (of stuff, see first paragraph) and I’m contemplating going up and doing some more work on my assignment.
Actually I really just want to sleep.
Have had a reminder email from the OU – I’m looking at doing a maths degree for a whole variety of reasons. One is that I was very good at maths at school right up until A level when I suddenly didn’t have a clue what was going on, and tied up with that was the fact that one of our two maths teachers hated me. As she was also my form teacher and the head of year, I didn’t have much option to get anything done about it – we discovered later that she picked on someone every year and I just happened to be the lucky one. Anyway, she pretty much destroyed my confidence in myself and maths, and I’ve regretted that for a long time. After I did my philosophy degree I went to Nottingham on one of these conversion PGCEs which started with a year of degree level maths, which I just about got through, but again never really felt comfortable with. Unfortunately all Nottingham has is a record of my attendance, nothing concrete to do with the courses, so I can’t even use the transcript for credit.
Reason two is that as and when I move to teaching at secondary level in the so far mythical erdkinder, I want to specialise in maths and computing, and I’d feel far more comfortable doing that with a full maths degree. I keep being referred to as the maths specialist which I am undoubtably am, but I’d still like to have the full qualification to back up the current knowledge.
Plus I like maths. I can’t help feeling that I’m just missing one vital ingredient and it will all suddenly come together.
So I want to do OU maths. Not just an OU degree, an OU maths degree. I don’t even want to water it down with computing although I could knock off their OU courses with one hand tied behind my back – 10 years in the industry will do that for you. I’ve been looking at the courses, and I have a choice – I can either start Using mathematics MST121 in september and then start the second course, MS221 alongside it in February. Or I can just do the two of them from February in a specially designed run together course, which might actually work best, but means waiting until February to get started, when really I want to get them underway.
Decisions, decisions. Alongside shredding my Montessori assignment, I was looking through the orignal A’s maths books on the night of the phone call – she’s recently done at least one of the two courses that I’m looking at and is now a year or so ahead of me. Given that she was in the maths class with me at A level (and we know about the teacher victimisation because same teacher started in on her sister the following year only to discover that her parents were far more savvy than mine and more inclined to believe their daughter than some teacher alleging that she’d suddenly become a different child) I take on board her verdict that I could do the two courses alongside each other easily in rather less than the time it states, but I still don’t know whether I should just get started or wait until February.
Any further contribution to the debate very welcome.
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