Quick update: four exams down, one to go.
That one is in nine days time.
Tonight: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, midnight screening at the Gala, Durham.
More later…
Posts Tagged ‘uni’
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Wo ist Jones?
May 21, 2008 by dafyd
Category 1 | Tags: exams,indianajones,uni | Comments Off
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Distracted
April 18, 2008 by dafyd
So, no real bloggy-news for quite a while. Sorry about that. Well, actually, no, I’m not.
It’s just coming to the end of the Easter vacation. Term restarts on Monday; I’m heading up to Durham on Sunday. My Finals start in just under three weeks’ time. I have three essays due by the end of next week, all in various degrees of completion (one on Proust is slowly killing me). Yes, I should be essay-writing now, yet for some reason I’m blogging. Go me. During this vacation, my procastinatory (definitely a word) exercises have reached heights previously unimaginable.
Anyway, that’s all going on. I’m fairly confident about most of my Finals – my marks so far for my French modules are fairly good and I’m well on track for a 2:1. Arabic, though, worries me, although I’ve pretty much come to the point where nothing I can do is going to change it. Que sera, sera, I think.
And for the last couple of months I’ve been rather distracted, anyway, by something. Or someone. *grin*
More news eventually, promise…
Category 1 | Tags: me,news,uni | Comments Off
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Ethnicity
May 4, 2007 by dafyd
A quick snip from Durham University’s Student Satisfaction Experience Survey 2007:
So… what’s the difference between White-British and White-Scottish? No White-English? Methinks someone has blundered…
Category 1 | Tags: durham,oops,survey,uni | Comments Off
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Do Nothing
February 1, 2007 by dafyd
Just to highlight the complete and utter ineffectiveness of Durham Student Union (DSU), this is a snip from the front page of its website:
It’s been promising a new site since before Christmas. Still waiting.
“Do Nothing” is, apparently, a DSU campaign to help freshers hunting for houses for next year, by getting them all to house hunt in the same week. Brilliant. Squeeze a term’s worth of house hunting into five days.
On the other hand, it could simply be DSU’s raison d’être…
Category 1 | Tags: dsu,durham,uni | 2 Comments
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Ooh, another update
October 2, 2006 by dafyd
I thought, being short of ideas, that I might type a little about what I’m actually doing on this course in Alexandria.
In one sense, I have no idea. I could be in nice, small, quiet Durham, enjoying the last few days before term starts, eating ham sandwiches and having a drink in the evenings in the Undie.
In the other sense – the one I actually meant – the course takes up four mornings a week. Yes, it really is a terribly heavy workload. Monday to Thursday, 9 o’clock to 1.30. The working day is divided into four sessions, each lasting an hour, with a half hour break at 11. In fact, most of the classes we have are doubles, so two hours, with a short break after an hour.
The focus of the course is, obviously, Arabic. That’s Modern Standard Arabic, sort of like Received Pronunciation, which is the base of the language spoken from Morocco to Iraq. We have seven hours a week of grammar and vocabulary (thrilling, I know), and three hours of translation between English and Arabic. Add to that two hours of Media (reading the newspaper) every Tuesday, and we have 12 hours a week of learning standard Arabic. Which is considerably more than I have ever spent dedicated to learning a single language.
The remaining four hours are Egyptian Colloquial Arabic – the Arabic actually spoken in Egypt. As Egypt is the centre of the Arab film and television industry, it’s fair to say that it is understood pretty much everywhere in the Middle East.
The course is incredibly good. So much better than Durham’s Arabic, but I’m not sure that’s saying much. We are in a dedicated building (the “TAFL Centre”), and our teachers are on the staff of the Faculty of Arts, teaching us as an extra, which makes them very good teachers. The materials we’re using have been written specially (not some crummy American textbook) and are very, very good. If Alexandria can get this right, why can’t Durham?
Anyway – there you go. A brief guide to my studies at the moment.
Category 1 | Tags: alexandria,egypt,uni,yearabroad | 2 Comments
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Settling in
September 13, 2006 by dafyd
Sorry about the lack of updates recently – now I’ve moved out of the hotels I’ve been hopping between, I’ve lost a reliable, constant internet connection. That should change soon, though, once we’re allowed to use the university’s computers.
Anyhoo… yes, I’m now in an apartment in Alex, living with Josh, also from Durham. Bizarrely, neither of us expected there to be any other Durham people on this course… says something about the organisational skills of Durham’s Arabic Department, methinks. We’re living literally 5 minutes away from the faculty, in an apartment block behind the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (the new Library of Alexandria). Very convenient, if a little shabby.
The TAFL (Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language) course started on Sunday, with a couple of days of induction, form filling and administrative stuff. Then yesterday, we started two days of revision – most helpful when the only Arabic we’ve looked at since late May was for a resit (which, incidentally, I passed). Tomorrow we have a test to judge our level of Arabic, to make sure we’re placed in the right level teaching groups. For some reason, a lot of people are obsessing over this test, really worrying about what happens if they don’t do well. Judging from what I’ve seen of the students from other universities (Manchester, SOAS, Westminster, Bremen, etc), they’ve got nothing to worry about. Besides – this isn’t a pass/fail test, and nothing is set in stone. I’d rather do fairly badly in the test and be put in a group that reinforces some of the things I’m not sure about than be put in a group in which I struggle to keep up.
So… that’s my life at the moment. Back at university, in a foreign country. That’s all I can think of for now. I have a couple of fairly interesting (and witty, I think) posts on general Egyptian life saved on my computer, which I’ll post when I get an opportunity. Suffice to say, the drivers here are absolute nutters.
Category 1 | Tags: alexandria,egypt,uni,yearabroad | 2 Comments
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Books
July 25, 2006 by dafyd
b-minus-5 and counting: the Blogathon is on Saturday – that’s this Saturday – and very few people have pledged to sponsor me. Come on!
If I don’t get sponsorship you won’t get to hear my witty anecdotes about meeting such literary luminaries as Johnny Ball and Bobby Robson (yes, that Bobby Robson). Can you afford to miss out?
In related news, either side of my trip to Paris, I went to events at Waterstone’s to meet Jasper Fforde and Jeffrey Deaver. Their new books are absolutely top notch – and I’ll be writing reviews of them on Saturday.
Totally unrelated news: my Arabic resit is on the first day it could possibly be – Wednesday 16th, one week after my birthday. Damn and blast. Better get cracking with the revision, I suppose.
Category 1 | Tags: arabic,blogathon,books,uni,waterstones | Comments Off
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Lecture, this afternoon
November 29, 2005 by dafyd
Category 1 | Tags: bored,rant,uni | 2 Comments