After putting this post off for what seems like (and physically is) months I feel like it's finally time to just suck it up and get this over with. I'll start with the crappy bits first to give a build up to a nice happy ending (quality story telling at it's finest right here).
So after the bombshell from student finance early in the year turned out to be a standard administrative error that actually only required a form being resent and 2 quick calls to OU all was pretty much smooth sailing for the rest of W100. It wasn't the most exciting course ever but I got a decent, passing grade out of it and it actually turned out to teach me some fairly useful, practical skills so all in all not particularly thrilling but a solid, useful module and something that I think was definitely worth doing and in particular worth choosing over the other options I had to get the credits.
I cant remember if I've mentioned it here before and to be honest I'm far too lazy to trawl back through my ramblings to double check but in February I also start DD206 (Use of Social Science). Like my original module (DD101) it's a generic Social Science module that pretty much everyone doing an OU degree in this type of subject ends up doing. As far as the work went it was actually pretty interesting, the case studies were on occasionally odd but always interesting subjects, the subject itself is really interesting and my tutor was absolutely brilliant. Even my Student Finance went (relatively) smoothly. Amazing. I think at the start I was pretty worried about doing the two modules together and whether that would be too much work but actually they fit in perfectly and being two entirely different subjects it was pretty easy to keep track of what was happening where.
After submitting my W100 final assignment and breathing a quick sigh of relief I was really looking forward to being able to get on with and concentrate on DD206 on it's own for a change but as it turns out it wasn't exactly meant to be.
Summer turned out to be what I think you could diplomatically call; a massive shitstorm and as I think happens more often that we realise life just seemed to get in the way. It's not my place or my prerogative to whinge on about the minor failures of life but I just felt the need, for whatever reason, to justify my decisions to strangers on the internet.
The long story short was that in the end I just didn't have the time, concentration, or energy to focus on the module. I did a few calculations and figured out that getting just 20 or so marks from the 4 remaining assignments would have still scraped me a pass but I always feel that half arsing an assignment takes only marginally less effort than doing it properly and in either case it just wasn't something I was going to be able to do. The other consideration was that as I'm now in my second year these marks and bare pass grades will have a direct effect on my overall degree classification and whether it's petty or not I've waited far too long and worked far too hard to throw the chance of a good degree classification away. So for the combination of all my many reasons I eventually found myself sitting on the staircase on hold to OU before eventually hanging up. Before phoning again. Then hanging up. Then phoning again, ad nauseum. Eventually I resolved to sleep on it and woke up the next morning knowing that I'd made the right decision when I'd originally decided to call and so finally ended up in a little room in the back of my office hysterically explaining the last 4 months of my life to a brilliantly calm and empathetic woman (who's name I genuinely regret not taking) who explained really clearly that deferring the remainder of my course would be no problem at all and that I could just restart again in October. With the wonder of hindsight I'm completely aware that everything I'd looked up said this as well but having it explained verbally like that was an absolute weight off my shoulders.
Thankfully I managed to give myself a decently hard mental slap and get my life reasonably in order (as much as it ever is) enough to get started this month. The deferral for DD206 means that I'm finishing the module off at the same time as starting DD203 but it's turned out to be absolutely brilliant timing. DD203 (Power, Dissent, Equality) is the first Political Science module of my degree and without being even more of a nerd than usual it's absolutely brilliant. The really interesting subject combined with a great tutor and some head battering (in the very best way) assignments are making it by far the most exciting module I've studied and a with W100 the subject matter is so completely detached from DD206 that keeping them separated is no problem at all and it's brilliant to be finally getting to grip with my degree subject at last.
All in all it's been an eventful few month for pretty terrible reasons but as usual it's all turned out for the best and I'm back to enjoying my modules, occasionally broken up by launching a highlighter at the wall, but mostly enjoying them. So there you go, the promised marathon whinge-athon with an uplifting happy end. I'm nothing if not predictable.
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