Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Planning for test 2

There are advantages to having tests every other week. For one thing everything is still relatively fresh in your mind, for another you get every other weekend where you still study but you can decompress a bit and relax.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to plan out my studying for next Monday so that I don't end up cloistered in my study room this weekend. We are done with classes at noon tomorrow and on Friday, so I am going to try to utilize those afternoons to go over the material from last week. I am still trying to figure out if there is any advantage is streaming the lecture more than once or if I should just stream once and then just use the annotated slides.

The workload remains steady, consistently busy but not horrible. I'm still withholding judgement on the educational value of the team based learning exercises. Some are more useful than others, but overall I worry that I get more out of studying on my own. It is a strange shift in perception since I've always preferred classroom learning.


In other news I finally have access for the slides to my autopsy case! We're going over them on Thursday, and it should be good since it was such a complex case. My lab professor is actually presenting the eyes to some of the ophthalmology staff today but I'll have to miss it for class. I will have to check back in with him to find out if they were able to diagnose the anomalies they found (which were oddly enough, not the anomalies they were expecting to find). This was an amazing case to be able to see/be able to present.

10 comments:

  1. Can you just go over exactly what team-based learning (TBL) entails? I was trying to glean some information about that from your previous posts, but I couldn't find anything that described the "team" component of this type of learning exercise.

    What makes it "team" oriented? Is it different than studying on your own? Do you HAVE TO study in a team, or better yet, is studying and learning the material contingent upon you studying in group format? If so, then this is BS. I would be protesting left and right about this, and I NEVER liked group work in college! God forbid if someone never did the proper amount of material, I flipped out and asked the professor to flunk them. If TBL is in any way like that, oh boyyyyy...

    (not that I have to worry about that because my college doesn't do it that way, thank god)

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    1. Thanks for all of your comments, btw. I will try to make an entry more about what a TBL exercise is like this weekend. But for now: No, you don't study as a team.

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  2. Alright, cool. I'm looking forward to reading about exactly what that's like. Thanks.

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  3. What was the overall diagnosis for the autopsy? I'm guessing it was a systemic disease that affected the eyes somehow?

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    1. The cause of death had nothing to do with the eyes. Two of the issues in the eyes were due to a known RASopathy, and the other was of uncertain origin.

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    2. And the cause of death was......?

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    3. There were enough unique facts about the case that I'm keeping all but the barest facts off line, including the cause of death.

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  4. The "all but the barest facts"? What does that mean? I'm trying to understand the verbiage there, but it's tough to wrap my head around it haha. This doesn't quite sit well with your previous blog on privacy.

    What exactly is the reason for not revealing the ultimate cause of death? It's not like you're revealing the patient's name or violating HIPAA. With how jubilantly you expressed your excitement about the autopsy case in the above blog, it would only make sense to provide your readers with some additional information so that they can understand WHY it was so complex/interesting, and perhaps shed light on the eyes, too.

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    1. The reason for not giving the cause of death is that the condition is fairly rare. It sounds egotistical to assume that someone (potentially family members, who would recognize their deceased loved one's symptoms) googling the condition would find their way to my blog; however, I get a surprising amount of traffic from people googling appendix pain which is common and much more widely discussed. If random people sift through search results to find that one page, someone with a more specific search term could very well find it.

      So it is general to say that they examined the eyes and that they found anomalies in them, but saying that they saw onchocerciasis (not what they found, just chosen because parasites are interesting) would allow identification by someone who knew the person... unless there has been a weird outbreak I haven't heard of ;-)

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  5. I wouldn't call that egotistical at all. Paranoid? Definitely. Did you try googling the cause of death first just to see how many online resources exist about it?

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