HANNAH'S REFLECTION

Motivation and positive experiences

My main motivation and expectation of this course was to help get myself into University. I really wanted to do well with this course as I hadn’t done well at school.I have to say I have really felt this course has worked better for me than school ever did.

My most positive experiences have not just been doing the course, but meeting others on my course and having really good conversations and debates with some of them about a range of topics: from whether Euthanasia is right or wrong to how useful Wikipedia can or cannot be. I also feel like my speaking and writing of French and Spanish has improved.

For Jordi’s class it included a lot of extra work on grammar and writing, but that was expected as I was doing an Advanced Higher course. I feel like I really learnt a lot from Spanish i.e. how to check my work properly, not something I always did before.

Roger helped build my confidence up on speaking and writing assuring me that the writing mistakes were mistakes even French people make due to the sound of the language.

I have to say John really helped in the way he taught maths, it was something I was really rather scared of. Most of my maths teachers before were not as patient and therefore I had believed that I’d always be useless at it, but John helped build my confidence up on that.

Improvements

I feel that the course could be improved by having the history assessments a bit closer together as it would give people more time to work on the history investigation, despite Evan’s thought that it takes barely anytime at all. I am aware of people worrying rather a lot about it.

The other improvement to the course that I believe needs to be available is access for communication classes to computers or laptops, and a PowerPoint screen. It’s a shame that the technology meant our first recorded presentations meant that many of us were almost blinded by an OHP light. I think that could have been avoided by having a better room. It’s a shame that the class has only changed location in the last month of the course.

Study skills really helped me to be reflective about my study and how much I’d achieved. I have to say a diary that I at first felt was not the greatest way of planning has now become really useful as a reference to what I’ve done, what I’ve to do and helped me to remember the way I’ve revised last time. I think I may even continue to use it, maybe not online but as a diary or something. We’ll see how well my time management goes.

Conclusions

I have learnt a lot from this course, how to time manage, finding different ways of revising, how to write essays. I have also found out how to structure my essays a lot better, when I think back to my first one for Jerry, structure was practically non-existent. I think I’ve learnt more about myself from this course than I expected. My first thought was just to do my best, but I’ve found I’ve done better than I thought I would. The fact I’ve got the marks I got, and passed things that I thought I’d panic, stress and therefore fail has allowed me to gain a bit more confidence with the things that I do, and I believe that’s probably the biggest thing I’ve learnt.

May 27, 2009 12:19 PM