...which would explain the long radio silence. Classes began a week ago Monday. I would have caught up over Labor Day, but got sucked into doing a giant work project that ensured I had not one free second to crack open a book all weekend.
My alarm now goes off at 5:30 AM. This results in wearing a headlamp to walk the dogs in the morning before class (when it is pitch black out) and afternoons where I either take a nap or sit like an inert lump of tapioca mainlining episodes of Scrubs on the computer.
I am taking three classes: Biological Structure and Function, which is basically A&P, but they didn't want to call it that for some reason, Medical Terminology, and Human Growth and Development for Health Professionals, which is way too long, ergo that class shall henceforth be known as Lifespan.
A&P is a classic auditorium class with 280 students, and yet it manages to not only not suck, but actually be good. I am impressed with just how chirpy and sunny our instructor can manage to be at the crack of dawn. And she even takes questions while she's lecturing, which is not so simple when there are more people in your class than in most airliners. There are free supplemental sessions and on-line this and that--all the bells and whistles! And of course there is lab. Lab met for the first time today. My lab TA is this guy with an impenetrable Indian accent. He talks like he has a tennis ball stuck halfway down his throat. His name is unpronounceable, and when he said it and I asked him how to spell it, he just said, "It's on the syllabus." He's actually a vet by training. My new lab partner, whom I picked based on the fact that she was sitting next to me and seemed to basically have it together, agreed we'll come earlier next week so we can sit closer to the front, in the hope that we'll better understand what this guy is saying. He mispronounces some of the anatomical names, which is sort of ridiculous, but whatever.
I have no complaints about Medical Terminology. It's an on-line class, and although I think we technically have an instructor, he or she does not really have anything to do. We have on-line pretests and tests that we take when we feel like we're ready and work through the exercises in the book at our own pace. Pretty straightforward.
Lifespan was a nasty surprise. It's another huge class with 120 people in it, and the contrast between this class and A&P could not be more crass. The instructor is an older lady who copies sentences, and often entire paragraphs, word-for-word from the textbook, slaps them up on PowerPoint slides, and reads them. She occasionally injects comments, but 98% of class time is her voice reading off the slides. To keep myself from falling asleep, I highlight the words in the textbook as she reads them. There are pages in my text that are 90% highlighted. We also have to use this stupid thing called a clicker. It's like those little keypads they use on the Ask the Audience part of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" The teacher puts up a multiple choice question and you have to answer it using the clicker. She did one yesterday, and by the time I pulled my unit out and had it ready to operate, she had closed the polling and my answer didn't count. And yes, I went up and bitched about it after class because these questions are part of our grade. The instructor seems like a nice enough person, but her instructional "style" is coma-inducing. The material is pretty dry to begin with, and she's not helping matters. I can only hope it gets better once we get out of the stupid theory crap that every field seems to front-load its textbooks with and into actual, y'know, development stages.
Life has pretty much shrunk to sleeping (not nearly enough), walking to and from class listening to lectures on my headphones (I tape all my lectures), actually attending class, walking dogs, procrastinating about doing homework, and actually doing homework. Other less-urgent items like cleaning, laundry, cooking, and the like have been almost wholly ignored. So far, I am always a step behind where I would like to be, and sometimes a step behind where I genuinely need to be.
Fortunately, I have a little more time before my first exams.
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