Thursday, October 9, 2008
Today's incredibly epic run-on sentence...
...is brought to you by Foundations in Health:
"Primary health care is essential health care based on practical, scientifically sound and acceptable methods and technology made universally accessible to individuals and families in the community through their full participation and at a cost that the community and country can afford to maintain at every stage of development in the spirit of self-reliance and self-determination."
Didja get all that?
Midterm #3 fast approaches
So this week has been craaazy. I completely burned myself out after studying for anatomy, so that I didn't even want to pick up my notes for physiology until the morning of the test. A lot of the information from anatomy also corresponded to physiology though so I didn't feel too bad about it. One of the questions was identical: Which order do body structures go in? Cells, tissues, organs, organ systems, organism. That was an easy one. The rest of it was kind of challenging because it wasn't just regurgitated information, it was applied to different scenarios. I was reasonably sure of my answers on 49/60, and had to rethink the rest before I turned it in.
Today is my Foundations in Health midterm. I've been a little (a lot) bored in that class because it is just so much fluff... I go twice a week for 1.5 hours, there's about 10 slides of actual content, and then a whole lot of discussion. I could care less what my classmates have to say about the topic, because they're coming from the same point of reference I am, mostly. So when the instructor asks if anyone knows something, and a few people take stabs at it and she's like, "Well, not really. It's actually this," it's not really serving to enhance my cognition.
So I've been rewriting all the useful slides into my notebook and it's actually pretty interesting stuff when you strip away all the froofy-let's-talk-about-it excess. It's about different models of thinking about society, i.e. capitalism or colonialism and how that applies to the healthcare provider's care.
And I got my first paper back from English. You may recall the tension between the prof and me. WORST SCORE EVER. Okay, I'm not trying to say that I'm the Canadian literary protege out to set records in the marks department. You read this blog, I'm sure a bazillion grammatical errors jump out at you (not that I write this casually in a paper, mind you). No, I've taken several English courses at the college level, and this one is supposed to be ENGL 108 - first year. I know what my writing's like, and how I'm likely to score. I got a 7.8 out of 10. First of all, wtf, .8? That seems, um, arbitrary. Secondly, 7.8? What do I have to do to write a '10' paper? All of the people in the class that I saw got 7.something. So out of the class I did above average. But still, scholarships don't give a rat's ass what the class average was. Either you make a 3.5+ or you miss out. I'm a little concerned.
Anyway, enough griping, I need to go and master this test.
Monday, October 6, 2008
One midterm down and another out of the way
Wrote Anatomy midterm #1 this morning at 1100. I had been studying feverishly for it for the past week. Wayyy overstudied - we had 1h 20 minutes to complete the test, and it took me (and most of the class) 30 minutes. On almost every question, I was high-fiving my brain. I don't feel annoyed though at over-studying, because I really learned a lot this week and even if it's useless to me now that I can name the carpals, at some point the information will be useful.
I'd say that I got at least 85%, including two diagrams to label (nail/distal phalanx and scapula). Of course, I may have to extract foot from mouth later on when we find the marks. But I am feeling positive overall.
Things that I studied that I needed to know:
Anterior structures of the scapula
Layers of the epidermis - Can Lucy Give Some Blood?
Organs of the nine abdominal regions
Structures of osteons
Arterial flow to the upper limb
Things I should have studied more:
Hyaline versus fibrocartilage
Holocrine glands (I know merocrine and apocrine, but they weren't on the test! rrr)
Things I probably didn't need to study as much as I did:
Features of the bones of the upper limb. Did not need to know at all, sigh...
Anything to do with muscle contraction & microscopic muscle anatomy
What epithelial cells were located at different structures in the body
So while there was some information I probably could have glossed over or read more on, our class did way better than the other section of first years. They have a different instructor who wrote purposely ambiguous questions to try and trick them! I guess (and this is just one person's feedback) that the instructor told the class what to study for the test, and then tested on entirely different material. Yikes.
Regarding the midterm out of the way - it's not really out of the way. It's just that I thought it was this week when it actually isn't until Wednesday of next week! Sweet!
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Quite possibly, my new best friend...
...Is this book. Yesterday I spent 6 hours around town at various quiet locations studying anatomy. I was mostly studying the bones of the pectoral girdle and the upper limb. My eyes started blurring around the coronoid fossa, but I whipped out my handy Analogy Guide To Anatomy, that then took what I was trying to learn by forced memorization and spelled it all out so nicely:
So as you can see, it quite resembles a workbook from Grade 2. But I could care less, because practically all of the stuff I read last night, I can still remember this morning! I can name most of the major structural features of the clavicle, scapula, humerus, radius, and ulna, I've got a handle on the articulations, and I can name/identify the carpals, metacarpals, and phalanges. It's like a flippin' miracle.
If you're struggling with anatomy, go now. Run. Purchase this book and then love every second of reading it. It's just one Ohhhh, that's how that works moment after another. Anatomy midterm, I shall conquer you yet! (Midterm begins in 27 hours)
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Nursing & Information Literacy
Yesterday we had an interesting workshop on researching information and how to find what you want. Since I've been a student for a few years now, I've already attended similar workshops and I thought it would be boring to go again. My prof, however, told us: Even if you've already been to an information literacy workshop, I highly suggest you attend this one.
Part of the attraction was that it's integrated with a research paper for my Discipline of Nursing class. The assignment is to pick a historical article from the year you were born or earlier, addressing some facet of the nursing discipline. Then research what's going on with that issue today. The nice part is I don't have to write a full paper - just the introduction and first paragraph, and include the reference list.
So the night before last, I attempted to get into the databases provided by my school library. I particularly wanted the Canadian Nurse journal, seeing as that would be probably the most relevant source. To my dismay, almost all of the databases only have full text from 1999 to present. Not very handy for my historical article! I spent a few hours digging around and found an article dated 1984. Not what I'd call "historical" (that means I'm historical!) but it just barely met the year qualifications. The title is "Do Nursing Educators Promote Burnout?" and it addresses nursing instructors setting impossible standards for students in the workplace. I figure there should be plenty of research on burnout!
We brought our articles into the workshop and we learned about using boolean operators to expand and narrow searches. I knew about most of them, i.e. '"Canadian nurs*" NOT Ontario AND "licensed practical"', but some were new. Did you know you can use parentheses? Cool! You can pretty much do your whole search in one go:
Nurs* AND (student OR undergrad) AND (instructor OR teacher OR professor OR educator) AND (burnout OR "compassion fatigue" OR exhaust*)
Plug that in to a search engine and, theoretically, you should come up with a subject that combines nurses, students, teachers, and burnout. Theoretically. It's pretty specific and it might exclude some otherwise-relevant information. But still! Parentheses!
We also saw a video with some scary statistics:
So, yeah. I like researching. I think the big obstacle for working nurses is probably finding the time to actually research! You can easily blow a few hours absorbed in the depths of Google or some article database, sidetracked from your original topic of interest. I don't know how likely it is that you say "Ok, I'll be back in half an hour, I just want to look up the latest evidence-based research regarding care of pressure ulcers".
*cough*
Anyway, information literacy, I has it. Now to actually use it... can't I do that after midterms? *whines*
Anatomy, Physiology, Discipline of Nursing, and Foundations in Health - midterms next week, in that order. I guess they wanted to squeeze them in before Thanksgiving, awesome! I'm up to my eyeballs in reading and studying. I'm focusing on Anatomy and Physiology because those ones are rote memorization, where Discipline and Foundations are a little more, shall we say, fluffy.
If you haven't checked out my sidebar, www.studystack.com is completely fantastic for making speedy flash cards and exporting them. I have them on my iPod Touch and whenever I'm standing around, I look through a few. Also, and this is flippin' sweet for Mac users, this link provides a small AppleScript file that allows you to highlight text, go to Services, and choose to have the text converted into speech (using "Alex", if you have Leopard), and then it gets imported into your iTunes Audiobooks. Since I have some books with online text, I have converted my readings into "speakings" - makes it a lot easier to get the readings done when you just have to lay down and stare at the ceiling!
That's my spiel for today. Happy studying, fellow students!
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