It is finished...and I didn't cheat

The test is over.

It was a tough test. There were actually a couple questions where I narrowed it down to two, but didn't have an inclination either way and had to just guess between the two answers. That doesn't happen very often. I think I did ok though.

All of my life I have had teachers impress upon me that cheating is wrong. As I grew older more and more teachers emphasized the issue of trust. It is unprofessional to treat someone as a cheater, unless they have shown that they are. As a teacher I learned that the more you tell someone by your actions that they are cheating, the more likely they will be to cheat.

In short, I'm used to teachers trusting me to not cheat, and I'm used to rewarding that trust by not cheating. So the testing in medical school is strange to me. It's a little dehumanizing. They take everypossible step to ensure there is no cheating. They assign seats, and change your assigned seat every time. They go with you to the bathroom. They herd you around like cattle to ensure that there is not even momentary mixing of the two groups of students. There are five or six people watching you all the time. The people from testing services are rude and sour (as I guess anyone who devoted there life to keeping students from cheating would be).

It is insulting. And it is strange to be receiving this treatment in medical school. From there behavior you would think they're training us to be criminals rather than professionals.

Happy Birthday

To the pretty lady in pink

On being the slowest kid in school

Next week we start a new class: Clinical Medicine. For this class we are divided up into small groups and we work with a primary care physician over the next year. An interesting twist to this is that the groups are not assigned by the school.

Friday we got an email announcing that we could select our group starting Monday at 12:30 and that if we hadn't selected a group by Wednesday we would be automatically assigned to one. Attatched was a list of options including the name of the physician and the time of the class.

I didn't recognize any of the names on the list except for Dr. Roe, who went to school with my father. I figured I would choose him since he and my dad got along well together and I thought I would like him as well. I figured most people would just let the computer select their physician for them, since none of us had any way of knowing who these people were. They were after all just names on a page.

So 12:30 Monday found me eating lunch in the lounge. I was a little confused because none of my friends were there and the lounge was pretty empty. About 12:40 they came in and asked me if I had chosen my group yet, since I had forgotten about it I got on the computer and signed on to the page. Out of the original 25 physicians on the list, only 5 were available to choose from 10 minutes into the selection process. I didn't get to be in the group I wanted, which I was a little disappointed about, but I don't really know anything about any of them. I just hope I didn't get an obstetrician.

I was amused by the whole episode. I can't figure it out. Why the rush? How were all these people making this choice? Did they pick based on the time? Or did the randomly pick? I know that once Dr. Roe was gone my choice was pretty random.

It is a little depressing. It just hits home how much I don't really fit in in medical school. It's a Type A world out there.

football

not sure if I should say anything about football this week or not. Maybe I'll just repost this previous comment.

CAITLIN ALANE said...
I love that Michigan isn't doing well...

sorry.

money

For the first time since 1975 the Loony is worth as much as the Greenback. So much for cheap shopping.

Produce

Here's what I don't get.

I'm in Michigan, in the heart of one of the most fertile areas in the world. And it's the middle of the harvest season.

I just moved from Arizona, one of the least fertile areas on earth. There isn't a harvest season

So why does produce cost more here? It's not just the store either. Across the board, fruits and vegetables cost more here.

study harder

Today we disarticulated the atlantooccipital joint and bisected the head. In other words, we pulled the skull off the vertebral column and cut it in half. It was a little weird, because we used a hand saw and just cut down the middle of the face. It was cool though to see the middle of the head.

In other news school is going well. Nobody has brought an AK-47 to school yet, so that's good. Also we have another test next week so the next round of feeling rotten about not studying enough has begun.

Crazy

This man:

http://www.zorkot.org/Houssein2.html

a third year medical student at WSU was arrested Saturday running through a public park in camoflouge with a loaded AK-47. That's right...he was carrying a loaded Russian assault rifle openly on the streets of the United States in the name of Islam.

It's a crazy world.

More things I learned on NPR

According to a recent study, friendships formed on MySpace and Facebook are not as close as friendships formed face to face. I never would have guessed.

Palestinian Rocket Attacks

Palestinians have been firing rockets at Israel for 20 years or so. Yesterday they managed to injure 12 people with one...their highest casualty total yet. The interesting thing is that a terrorist group claimed responsibility for it. If I was firing rockets every day at a nation of 6 million plus people less than a stones throw away, I'd have standards a little higher than 12 injured. I mean if you're going to take the time and trouble to launder and squander European aid money on rockets the least you could do is actually kill some Jews and make Allah happy. I mean come on.

It also makes you wonder though why Israel bothers responding seriously. I think a little laughter would go a long way to shaming these people.

Also, Hillary Clinton's top campaign fundraisers are known as the Hellraisers. One of them was recently arrested so she had to give the money he raised back.

Also Oprah endorsed Barack Obama for president and managed to raise 3 million dollars for him at one event. Hmmm I wonder why she did that. It might be for the same reason she said last week that it was ok for Michael Vick to torture and brutally kill dogs.

The things you learn on NPR. You can't make this stuff up.

Ping Pong

There's a ping pong table in the student lounge at school. We go down there pretty much every day at lunch and take turns playing while we eat. It's pretty much the only place where first anf second year students actually mix at all. It's a lot of fun. The second year students think they're really good at ping pong. And in general they are. But anytime they're losing they talk about how badly they're playing and how suprised they are to be losing to a first year. Usually we play doubles which means I'm not any good. My strength is consistency--hitting every shot back. So if I'm playing with a partner I'm only half as consistent. Today we played singles, there weren't many people there. Anyway I played this guy that puts a lot of spin on the ball and is always slamming it on the table and stuff. ANyway I absolutely pasted him two games in a row, 21-9/21-11. He kept staring at his paddle like there was something wrong with it (he brings his own special paddle to school, I always play with the broken one that only has half a handle). It was hilarious. I probably shouldn't gloat though, I'll probably lose again tomorrow.

Then I went and studied--don't worry, I do study, just not every second of the day. Games are good for the soul--especially when you win. (but I'm not competitive or anything)

A picture

Just because I can put anything I want in my blog

Television

So I watched a little TV yesterday. I don't generally watch much, but Adrienne was working so I turned on the football game while I studied. I didn't watch much more than a quarter though because Michigan stinks. I've never seen a game as bad as that. Oregon completely creamed them in every way. It was like watching Arizona play.

I think commercials are better now than they were ten years ago. I think advertisers may have finally figured out that you have to give people a reason to keep watching through a commercial break. There were some really funny commercials. I think they pull out all the stops for football season. Hey look at that, I just used a figure of speech from church to describe something that causes people to skip church.

One more thing about commercials. Apparently they're turning Geico's cavemen into an actual television show. Talk about clever advertising.

Dates

I've got to get a post in today. It's 9/8/7, how could you not post today.

for good measure...check out the time of the post

brains

Yesterday we cut out the brain. It was cool. We were the stars again. We got it out in one piece and managed to cut all twelve of the cranial nerves and leave pieces of each of them sticking out of both the brain and the skull.

So the test went well. I honored both histology and anatomy practical. I was one question short on the written anatomy. If you add them all together I got over 95%.