Financial & Travel Musings

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In days gone by, universities offered nice simple “packaged degrees”. Oh, sure you could vary the optional courses within one of their packages but, by and large, they stuck to the tried and trusted combinations such as BSc in physics, BA in English and whatnot.

These days though, flexibility is the name of the game and perhaps the ultimate in that game is the Open University. In addition to their general degree, they offer what’s quite a bewildering range of named degrees.

For example (and this is a simple example), in my own case I am on my (hopefuly) final course for a BA Hons Modern Languages in French and Spanish. Except that it’s not so simple because right now I could claim a BA degree and (all being well) I will also have the choice of a BA Hons degree as an alternative to the Modern Languages named one.

Had I changed one course I could have had a BA Hons European Studies or the modern languages in French & English or Spanish & English. Change two courses and you can add combinations such as BA Hons Humanities, BA French & Law, and many others.

What adds even more complexity is that the OU degrees are normally taken part-time so that they can span anything up to 12 years which is obviously quite a lot of time in which to change your original plans and many people do that of course (me included: I never dreamt that one day I’d be talking about finishing a modern languages degree).

Whilst this flexibility is, on the whole, a “good thing”, you do need to keep an eye on what you’re doing to avoid ending up with a rag-bag collection of subjects within your degree. If you’re planning on doing something with it some kind of focus is essential to avoid confusing potential employers. That’s not to say that you can’t throw in the oddball course that you always wanted to do (mine may be their Creative Writing course) but it’s best avoiding the temptation to do a lot of unrelated courses.

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When you initially start on a study programme, it’s usually easy enough to “choose” a course in that the early courses you do are usually compulsory for whatever study programme you’re following.

Sometimes it’s easy enough to choose the next one as you’ll choose the course options that originally attracted you to the study programme. For example, you’re going to need to do Spanish if your original reason for following a languages degree programme was to be able to speak Spanish.

However, eventually most people run off the end of the obvious choices for them and then find that they’re innundated with advice and “obvious” choices that they should take. For example, most language degrees will require you to also take English. When you follow a series of foreign language programmes with one in English, you’ll probably find it fairly simple and your marks will probably reflect that. When you’ve high marks in a subject, everyone will suggest that you continue with it, but that doesn’t mean that you should. If you’re only doing that subject to fulfill a course requirement then you need to consider whether or not you even like that subject irrespective of whatever marks you might be getting in it.

At degree level, you need to concentrate on subjects that you enjoy, not what other people think you should be doing. Running with subjects that you don’t enjoy is a recipe for disaster at this level. Sure, you’ll have to do some compulsory subjects that you’re not necessarily enthusiasic about but you definitely don’t want to add optional subjects that you don’t like.

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We’ve a special interest in reading to our kids as we’re in France and we want them to grow up knowing English as native speakers and readers.

Of course, it’s not just the business of reading that matters in our case, it’s the topics of the books too. In their nursery school it’s the French nursery rhymes and fables that they’re coming across so at home we make a point of working our way through the various stories that we came across in our own childhood.

Up to now, we’ve been concentrating on the Ladybird range which is for babies up to around five or thereabouts although that’ll depend on your childrens’ interests and notionally their range runs up to around seven. However, just by chance we came across the Usborne range of books which seems to pretty much take over where Ladybird finish although with quite a bit of overlap.

As with all these publishers aiming at the child market, they’ve loads of different ranges of books but the one we chanced on was their Young Readers Series 3. It’s actually aimed at older children than our nearly 4 and nearly 6 year olds but they just love the books so we’re planning on plugging away with those over the next six months or so although with the remainder of the Ladybird ones and some from the Usborne Series 2 mixed in amongst them.

Since we’re in France, we also get a library book from the school each week and read that to the boys in English which is much harder to do than you’d think. After all, if you’ve learnt French as a teenager or adult you’ll have missed out on all the words for things like witches and goblins which make up a surprising amount of the reading material that ends up getting brought home. So far though we’ve only been defeated entirely by one book.

Our next challenge will be to teach James to read and write in English.

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