I don’t know how it is for other universities or other courses, but for me very few teaching sessions are well-defined; I don’t really know what these ‘seminars’ or ‘tutorials’ are supposed to be, as it’s never consistent.
I just turn up and take what I get…sometimes it is essentially a lecture, or sometimes if it’s genuinely a ‘tutorial’, we’ll be going through a piece of work we are supposed to have already completed.
Sometimes seminars are interactive-style lectures, which can range from a (doctor) teacher talking at us with the odd question thrown in, to a teacher grilling you over a subject in detail (painful, but it makes you learn it) or if you’re really unlucky, a teacher playing ‘guess what I’m thinking’ and asking you vague questions repeatedly until you finally say what they want to hear.
What's Frida got?
These are all relatively okay, but there’s a new breed of teaching style emerging that is becoming much more prevalent within the medical school, and infuriating me more and more often. And that is the ‘break-out session’.
As far as I can gather, modern teaching ideals say that sitting us all in a lecture to be fed information is bad and wrong, and everything should be interactive and have feedback and involve discussions of how we feel about the subject. So instead of say, sitting 400 people in a lecture theatre to listen to an expert explain a subject to us, they split us into small groups, put us into a variety of junk-filled classrooms and make us spend an hour with a chirpy medical educator who spends the first 10 minutes asking us to brainstorm what we already know about catheters. NOTHING. That’s why I’m here…
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to group discussion/communication practise. There’s some instances where the medical school does it really well - I love it when we get the chance to talk to the actor patients, or ‘expert patients’ (usually someone living with a long-term condition), because we get clear, personal feedback on how we are doing, and useful insight from an outside person.
But often I feel that it is forced unnecessarily, or with no clear guidelines to what we’re doing and why. Earlier this year, I found myself sitting with four other people looking at a Frida Kahlo painting and discussing the answers to a list of questions about how this reflected her feelings about her medical conditions.
“I guess she feels…sad?” Sorry, but without someone with some kind of arts or humanities background to help me, I’m not really going to have a clue. And what does it matter what I think actually? Unless the medical school is worried that I’m incapable of feeling and empathy (and don’t worry, I always cry at the end of Gladiator) I find it highly unlikely that a patient is going to present to me with an abstract self-portrait of her body for me to interpret.
“Hmmm, there’s a lot of heavy brush-strokes in this…perhaps she’s got MS”.
A bit hirsute, bushy eyebrows - probably PCO disease?
Alternatively she’s a he ! That might explain her volatile marriage
Mind you that wall paper makes a statement. Pink on green only really works in nature. Perhaps she is colour blind.
But don’t worry Lond Med Stud - you start to really learn once the rubber hits the road - panic is a good tutor!
Definitely a tranny
The trouble is, there’s no escape from all this nonsense when you grow up. Senior Trust managers still delight in organising ‘away days’ to think up their latest wheezes for making life impossible for their employees, and they nearly always involve role playing. If I had my way, anyone proposing a role-playing session would be disemboweled on the spot. Slowly.
Absolutely spot on - instead of providing education value for the time available there is a tendency to have longer sessions of sitting around flipcharts making things up on the hoof. Following a recent incident in our Trust it was decided that the monadatory training on the subject needs to be 4 1/2 instead of 3 1/2 hours. This was filled with a sesion on “self-reflection” so the requirment was met but with no added value whatsoever!
What’s Frida got? Colour blindness, thick eyebrows, a big jaw and (I bet) large hands. Definitely XY.
Bit of a shame that ‘packed curriculum’ for pre-clinical teaching appears to you the student to waste time. Clinical teachers like myself are appalled at the gaps left in pre-clinical teaching and frequently report back about deficiencies to be met by defensive responses from qualified Medical Educationalists. Medical learning flourishes when the teacher is highly committed and is only confused when unskilled teachers try to use modern educational theory. Why not more clinical teachers in pre-clinical schools. Sorry no jokes, wasting time in medical school is no laughing matter considering the amount of competition in the medical workforce.
I hate to break this to you TOM, but I’m a 4th year student, in my second clinical year!