Access courses - very useful
Jul. 6th, 2006 06:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethThe best things about the Access courses aren't the things you could get out of text books. Studying as mature students has been a whole different experience than school, and as well as subject specific stuff I learned invaluable things that are harder to fit on paper.
In school, everyone you know does all the same things at the same times. You pick your subjects, then you do GCSEs, then you pick more subjects and do A-levels, and then theoretically go on to university and study more there. Everyone is within a year of the same age. And its set up like hurdles, or like the high jump where they keep raising the bar. Everyone is aiming at these same marker points all at once, and then some people make it and some people don't. And with the whole competitive thing schools have going, not making the grades is... a concept with a big negative association. So if at some point I didn't jump the hurdle, I found it easy to think of it as failing. Badness. Like everyone else was going off to university like the plan said kids my age should, and I was stuck with having messed up. I think school even tried to give us the idea that you get one chance, that high school was our one chance to do that stuff. Encouraging(!).
But going on an Access course, with other mature students... In school, it can look like a race, everyone on this one straight run between going in and getting out. But with Access, everyone got there by so many different paths, you can't think of it that way at all. All different ages, from long retired to only just older than A-level students. All different backgrounds, educational and general life. Many different sets of challenges.
And all of them putting so much work into just being there. I mean in school, the effort is all invested in getting out. For mature students, there's so many other things in their lives, they (we!) have to work so hard to get in and stay on the course. It really changed my idea of the value of this stuff.
And of the value of me and my achievements to date. I mean, I couldn't be all blah at myself without it seeming bad at other people, who were doing this course and were older than me or hadn't done as much school or whatever else. All that stuff I was so fed up at myself about, the hoops I hadn't jumped, I saw all these different people doing things their way, and it put it all in a new perspective. People get where they're going in their own way, at their own speed, and they're all pretty cool really. So that had to include me.
I've also, over time, rearranged the inside of my head to notice that actually, academic achievement isn't the only way to measure success. Especially in people not me. It helps to notice that many people have skills I lack. Taxi drivers, for instance, can navigate and take changing conditions into account, and operate complex machinery at high speeds, and actually not crash. Oh, and meet new people very often and talk to them and be in the same car and be cool with it. And my helpful cleaner person has the cleaning magic. I'm not sure I always valued that stuff much, but I have gained an appreciation for all these people that make my life worky.
I still have a bit of me that sulks when people get better grades than me. It isn't a very attractive part. I tell it off and go be glad they're doing well. And I do the happy dance whenever I get good grades, which is a whole lot more fun than getting told off for Bs was. I happy dance at a wider variety of 'good' as well, because I did work for them all, and getting a pass mark would be happy dance inducing, let alone a distinction.
I've also found that even though all this, the Access course or the particular degree course I'm on next year, wasn't in the original plan or many versions of the revised plan, it all works out pretty good. I'm doing interesting things, learning stuff, having fun. And ending up doing some things I hadn't expected, but other things I always did plan on I'm also doing, only rather better than I used to. I have more stuff to work with.
I think that adds up to learning to value the journey. Not jumping through hoops, no particular hoops around. Just... if I'd done these exact same courses as a teenager? I wouldn't have got half as much out of them. I wouldn't have been the same person at the time, I wouldn't have seen the same texts, I wouldn't have the same experience and data and toolkit to bring to it. So the way I got here, I got a lot of good stuff along the way. Unexpected, but good.
I am happy. I achieved all this.
:-D
In school, everyone you know does all the same things at the same times. You pick your subjects, then you do GCSEs, then you pick more subjects and do A-levels, and then theoretically go on to university and study more there. Everyone is within a year of the same age. And its set up like hurdles, or like the high jump where they keep raising the bar. Everyone is aiming at these same marker points all at once, and then some people make it and some people don't. And with the whole competitive thing schools have going, not making the grades is... a concept with a big negative association. So if at some point I didn't jump the hurdle, I found it easy to think of it as failing. Badness. Like everyone else was going off to university like the plan said kids my age should, and I was stuck with having messed up. I think school even tried to give us the idea that you get one chance, that high school was our one chance to do that stuff. Encouraging(!).
But going on an Access course, with other mature students... In school, it can look like a race, everyone on this one straight run between going in and getting out. But with Access, everyone got there by so many different paths, you can't think of it that way at all. All different ages, from long retired to only just older than A-level students. All different backgrounds, educational and general life. Many different sets of challenges.
And all of them putting so much work into just being there. I mean in school, the effort is all invested in getting out. For mature students, there's so many other things in their lives, they (we!) have to work so hard to get in and stay on the course. It really changed my idea of the value of this stuff.
And of the value of me and my achievements to date. I mean, I couldn't be all blah at myself without it seeming bad at other people, who were doing this course and were older than me or hadn't done as much school or whatever else. All that stuff I was so fed up at myself about, the hoops I hadn't jumped, I saw all these different people doing things their way, and it put it all in a new perspective. People get where they're going in their own way, at their own speed, and they're all pretty cool really. So that had to include me.
I've also, over time, rearranged the inside of my head to notice that actually, academic achievement isn't the only way to measure success. Especially in people not me. It helps to notice that many people have skills I lack. Taxi drivers, for instance, can navigate and take changing conditions into account, and operate complex machinery at high speeds, and actually not crash. Oh, and meet new people very often and talk to them and be in the same car and be cool with it. And my helpful cleaner person has the cleaning magic. I'm not sure I always valued that stuff much, but I have gained an appreciation for all these people that make my life worky.
I still have a bit of me that sulks when people get better grades than me. It isn't a very attractive part. I tell it off and go be glad they're doing well. And I do the happy dance whenever I get good grades, which is a whole lot more fun than getting told off for Bs was. I happy dance at a wider variety of 'good' as well, because I did work for them all, and getting a pass mark would be happy dance inducing, let alone a distinction.
I've also found that even though all this, the Access course or the particular degree course I'm on next year, wasn't in the original plan or many versions of the revised plan, it all works out pretty good. I'm doing interesting things, learning stuff, having fun. And ending up doing some things I hadn't expected, but other things I always did plan on I'm also doing, only rather better than I used to. I have more stuff to work with.
I think that adds up to learning to value the journey. Not jumping through hoops, no particular hoops around. Just... if I'd done these exact same courses as a teenager? I wouldn't have got half as much out of them. I wouldn't have been the same person at the time, I wouldn't have seen the same texts, I wouldn't have the same experience and data and toolkit to bring to it. So the way I got here, I got a lot of good stuff along the way. Unexpected, but good.
I am happy. I achieved all this.
:-D