I had not thought this through beforehand, but somewhere along the line I fell into the pattern of completing a whole unit of one of my courses at a time. No one day one one course, the next day the other, then repeat, nor a bit of each course every day. Nope, I work right through one unit of a course for however many days it takes, then work right through the corresponding unit in the other course (though that's not strictly true, as I'm not at the stage of "corresponding units" any more; not since I cut my losses on M381 and accepted that I'd be behind until the end, but you get the idea).
Pro: I get to keep my mind on one area of maths, e.g. Complex Analysis, for a few days without disrupting my flow by having to get my head around Church's Thesis slap-bang in the middle. Then, within Complex Analysis itself, I get to cover an entire unit, which basically equates into a single topic, residues, Laurent series, or whatever, to its conclusion before switching to something completely different. And these courses are different! Psychologically, this way also helps me feel like I'm getting somewhere, you know? Because I can tick off another completed unit fairly quickly. I'm well aware that this is silly, because technically, I should progress at the same pace either way, but it feels effective at least. A schedule placebo of sorts.
Con: I am prone to not remembering diddly when I get back to one course after maybe a week on the other one. This is worse with M381 because of the fact it alternates Logic / Number Theory / Logic.. It could be three weeks by the time I get back to number theory after our last encounter. That can't be too helpful for driving the material home, can it? Would I have had to look up Euclid's Lemma what seems like a hundred times already, if I were chip-chip-chipping away at M381 every day? Who knows?
Anyway, why am I telling you this? I don't know. It just strikes me as curious, that beavering away in the solitude of our homes, we've probably all fallen into patterns of study quite unique to ourselves. I assume they vary wildly. I'd certainly not be surprised to find that any of my fellow OU students are doing a couple of hours of each course per day. But it doesn't work for me. I'm fairly sure that I started off with the intention of doing it that way. And I didn't make a conscious effort to stop either; but it clearly happened at some point.
Until this year, I'd not had two courses at the same time, so I've never had to tackle differing topics concurrently. I opted to do MST121 and MS221 with an overlap, starting one in the autumn and the other in February, but it wasn't quite the same. Not only were there long periods of one course only, but they also complemented each other in terms of content. Then of course, M208 was a 60-pointer, so it was not an issue there either. In fact, that's the one thing I find attractive about the upcoming level 3 pure maths course; at least in terms of scheduling, there'll be no need to work out how to go about it. Though, I'm not interested in any other way than that, and I'm so glad I started with the OU when I did, so I'm still on for M338 Topology next year before it goes bye-bye.
Neil H
