Note to self: devote more time to coming up with wittier blog titles.
Anyway, for the indubitably vast, global audience that no doubt hangs on my every written syllable, I started an access course in September, and I thought it might be fun to pepper my blog with a more personal flavour, in addition to it's usual programming. Incidentally, Google chrome is informing me that I have spelled flavour wrong. Well you listen to me Google chrome, this is Britain! You hear me? Britain! You're not allowed to tell me something is spelled wrong just because it doesn't match up to your warped defilement of the majesty that is the English language. We only invented the bloody thing! Damn Americans.
Um... yeah, studying and stuff
For those who don't know, an access course is aimed primarily though by no means exclusively at people who, for whatever reason, don't have the necessary academic qualifications to get into university, or perhaps do, but not for the subject of their preference. In my case, I dropped out of school at the age of 17, four years ago next month as a matter of fact. After a few years in the wilderness, I decided I wanted to study theoretical physics, which has led me to this course, which will lead me to doing A-levels upon it's completion in 18 months, which will, all being well, lead to university in 2017. Now, background information, or to needlessly use some film terminology, establishing shot out of the way, let's actually look at the course it's self
Essentially, I and my classmates will be studying English and Maths at essentially GCSE level, in addition to the three major sciences at GCSE level in year one and AS level in year two, AS level for those who don't know being essentially the first year of a two year A-level course. In our first four months, we've looked at osmosis and basic anatomy in biology, the period table, salts, and fractional distillation in chemistry, and random and systematic errors, Hooke's law, and electrical resistance in physics. (Incidentally, as a heads up, I am very much in favour of Oxford commas) However, English and Maths are currently the more pertinent to discuss, as it is these two that we face exams for this coming Monday. Last night, Monday night that is, we had what was largely a review session of essentially everything we had covered in maths up to this point. Nothing too drastic in the grand scheme of things, the maths on the course being GCSE equivalent meaning that we faced nothing that had not been previously encountered. The few months we've spent doing maths has more or less been a refresher course, everything from shapes, angles, perimeter, area and volume to probability, averages, graphs, long multiplication and division, and multiplying and dividing by decimals and fractions. It's nothing new, but it has been 4 years since I was doing GCSE maths, and even longer for others. The information not being fresh coupled with the workload it's self being quite densely packed has resulted in the course, even doing it part time, being more intense than one might think for GCSE level, quite a few people in the class already having dropped out, our numbers having dwindled from 19 in September to 12 at present.
Tomorrow night brings English, the last stop on our journey before pulling into examination station on Monday. Ideally, I'll be doing a fairly broad review of English tomorrow night, and looking in more depth at each individual lesson in future, but with last night's and tomorrow night's classes largely being review sessions, it's not really feasible to cover everything we've done in four months in one blog. Still, promising beginnings, or so I feel. Until then, I've been the maths student, and I can confirm that two plus two does, in fact, equal four.
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