Friday 3 February 2012

Starting out - Total War and Social Change

Tomorrow I start my 5th (if you don’t count the small 12 week ‘start writing fiction’ course which started it all off) Open University module – AA312 Total War and Social Change.  9 months work for 60 credits towards my degree.
As always I am nervous and excited but this module is a little more daunting than normal.  
Partly because it is my first History module, and as it is a Level 3 module this puts me straight in at the deep end.  But I have now had a look at the study calendar and this is the really scary bit.  
The OU are great in giving you a plan of what you should be reading/listen to/watching each week making it easier for you to plan your time.  Normally you would ‘study’ for 4 or 5 weeks and then having a ‘reading week’ where you can catch up if you need to and work on your assignment.  The AA312 calendar has no reading weeks.  Studying and assignment writing have to be done at the same time.  
You could speculate that this is just part of it being a level 3 course, but I have done other level 3 course (two in fact – what is wrong with me?) which had reading weeks.  I think it is just that there is so much to cover in the time we have that there is no time for breaks.
With this in mind I rather fear the blog will get forgotten, so if you find that not much is happening here over the next 9 months, spare a thought for me as I cram as much information into my head as possible and work towards my first exam in 7 years.

I should point out that I am doing this off my own back and am really exciting about the subject material.  It’s just the timetable and exam which are really scary.  I can always drop out if it all gets too much; but I like to finish what I start.

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