While You Wait
Long ago, having ill-advisedly embarked on a Civil Engineering degree course and finding it just wasn’t me, I dropped out of university at 18, though I had secured the promise they’d take me back in the next October to do Maths. With nothing to do for ten months, I joined an old friend who’d just taken seventh-term Oxbridge entrance and also found he had time on his hands, and found work. Our first attempt was as labourers at an electric motor factory in Huddersfield, lifting huge cast iron cases for the motors and taking them on carts to other parts fo the factory. My friend was a top violinist with very precious fingers, so we realised this didn’t have much of a future. As a lover of the great outdoors, he moved on to his dream job as a grave digger and I was privileged to be accepted as a computer programmer/analyst at Huddersfield College of Technology, now the University of Huddersfield, working on an Elliott 4100 (for technos), the only computer in the College. That’s another story, but it nearly tempted me into a life in IT, which would have been a very different career. During the ten month wait, I realised I had a problem. I had been in the very last cohort of school children to be taught traditional mathematics, and those I would be joining in the following October would have studied all the modern topics such as matrices, vectors, transformations, sets and logic, of which I knew very little, to say nothing of the whole field of statistics. I scoured the bookshops (no internet in those days) for good material and spent my spare time reading up on all I had missed.
That experience taught me that Maths was even better than I had imagined, but it was also pretty hard to learn on my own! Still I persisted and happily by the time October came around I had at least a basic understanding of topics that would be taken for granted in my degree course.
It strikes me that every 18-year-old is now in the same position. University entrance procedures may be unknown as yet, but the better students will surely find their way through. What’s important is that they don’t arrive having done nothing for six months, missed out on the progress they would have made in the last term of their course (and the Easter holiday) and be ill-equipped to start learning at a high level. 16-year-olds waiting to start A-level are arguably there too, and even 14-year-olds preparing for a GCSE course.
So I’ve prepared two sets of new courses - “While You Wait” courses, in a relaxed and enjoyable way preparing students for the next stage of their learning, and “Keep It Going” courses, for those who just want to finish their current course with a thorough knowledge of what they should know. It is quite likely, after all, that universities and sixth forms will want to assess their prospective students in some way before they start their new courses, and some test may well be involved in that. Check out the new courses here.