Anatomatrix

FQHC = Federally Qualified Health Center CAC has a bunch of medical-associated meanings, including Children's Acute Care, Children's Asthma Care, Child Advocacy Centers, and Computer Assisted Coding. OP will have to clarify.

Unless I had a bad experience, I always take the auto care surveys back to my service technician, unmarked, along with the postage paid envelope. What they do with them is their business. Techs I trust have told me this is better than filling it in and mailing it. Every time I get a bad evaluation from a student (I teach pre-nursing A&P), I think about Press Ganey evals and how wrong it is that my livelihood (or yours) depends on these evaluations from people whom we were helping but who just maybe didn't enjoy the experience. Mind you, I look for constructive criticism and also get plenty of unsolicited good feedback in e-mail and personal phone calls from students, but on my official reviews the auto-scored section is always a wide range from great to terrible and the comments section is always full of things such as "tests were hard" or "can't teach". I have asked some students with whom I had good relationships if they put comments on the forms and they always say, "No, you were excellent, I had nothing constructive to add." A patient who has had an uncomfortable experience - and almost any hospital visit has some degree of discomfort - and gets a survey with their bill: is there any way the results could be skewed MORE toward venting? Throw in the common misconception that nurses have little training and don't know much and are there mainly to make you feel better and it's a recipe for a bad evaluation.

I just wish I could explain this to pre-nursing students without getting the rolled eyes, etc. IMO, the prerequisite classes are a good time to practice the habits they'll need in professional programs, but way too many of my students do not read, or study on their own, or even review things I flat out say will be on the test. There are way too many students who are playing the GPA game then hoping for luck in a lottery for nursing school, rather than trying to learn the material. OTOH, I always have a few hard workers who do well and go on to programs of their choice. For those of you in nursing school, please know that there are people who understand how hard you work, and how tough it is. If your family is not in that group, I hope they come around. When you're done, all that hard work will have molded you into a professional worthy of everyone's respect!

We do appreciate the follow up. Here's one more thing: you've probably helped dozens of people by sharing your story. Kudos! Teache sounds like a winner too. I can see why you felt comfortable in her class.

Right up through the word STAT I was thinking, "So what? That isn't completely uncommon." Then I read the last sentence and blew iced tea through my nose.

The above is great advice. Memorize the first paragraph before you go in. :) Think of this as part of your education. It's a lesson in respect and etiquette, but it's also training in facing meetings which may involve confrontation. I think your anticipation is much worse than the actual meeting will be. Use this to learn how to handle such situations - it will not be your last uncomfortable meeting. On flowers: I appreciate flowers from my students - but only after the course is finished. I've never received (nor do I want to receive) a lavish bouquet. I've received a couple of small potted plants as a thank-you after graduation, and one advisee student who was accepted into an advanced program gave me a very nice smaller arrangement. I think I would be a little uncomfortable receiving flowers from a student during a course, and since we're not supposed to accept gifts from current students it would be an awkward situation.

Long post: you have my permission to just skim the first words of each paragraph, LOL!!! I'm a little surprised nobody has mentioned different learning styles, although at least one person did say "we all learn differently" which is true (edit: now two... anurseatlast posted while I was writing this!) Many people who go into teaching are verbal-non-visual learners. Simplified, that means they learned best by reading. Many MANY people who go into nursing are kinesthetic learners who learn best by DOING. A few are auditory learners. All of this is complicated for some of you by life experience which includes a lot of TV (compared to someone like me who was raised in the 50s), perhaps some video games, and the Internet, all of which encourage a short attention span and a lack of patience (gotta-havit-right-now syndrome). Finally, and especially for today's teens who are just beginning their post-HS education, there is a lack of familiarity with note-taking time-savers like cursive writing. I wondered why my students didn't take notes in class, but instead asked repeatedly for me to provide class notes, copies of my PowerPoints, exam study guides, etc. When I realized that the vast majority of them ONLY either print or type - excuse me, "keyboard", used as a verb - it makes more sense. My mom (b. 1917) did not understand how I could handle university without knowing shorthand. I'm amazed these young folks can handle it without cursive (speedy) writing. I wouldn't presume to determine a learning style just from notes here, but most of you have probably had such an assessment by now (Google VARK if you haven't). It's true that you need to know the material in the book, and you aren't going to be spoon fed everything in lectures. This is deliberate - when you're in nursing you're going to get surprises and "pop quizzes from life" every day, and you need to be ready. The read-three-times advice usually goes something like this: (1) Skim the chapter, noting themes and paying close attention to all diagrams and their legends. Make notes about what seems totally new to you. (2) Read for content, usually word for word. Make notes of anything you don't understand. Outline the chapter. Visual-non-verbal learners (learn from graphics/illustrations) and kinesthetic learners should consider making a concept map of any major ideas, fact-trees, processes or procedures covered in the chapter. Auditory learners may find it helps to read the chapter out loud, possibly even recording yourself then listening to the recording. Kinesthetic learners can use clay to build models of concepts. Ideally all this is done before the lecture, but you can tell that some of these ideas take tons of time, so time management is crucial and you have to focus on what works for you and what is important vs. trivial. (3) After the lecture, read the chapter again with your lecture notes available, to review what the professor thought was important enough to emphasize. One last thought: it's possible to misunderstand a professor's instructions. On a larger scale, human communication is fraught with misunderstandings. I'm sure (or at least I hope) that part of your education includes training in communication, and how to be an active listener as well as use the spoken confirmation technique. (Person 1 says something. Person 2 repeats it. Person 1 confirms. In the most stilted version, the one that saved my marriage, ha-ha, Person 2's line goes something like this: "I hear you saying such-and-such," without added interpretation or really much of any response. After you're sure you heard what you thought you heard, then you can go on to respond. It takes forever sometimes. It really seems silly. It really DID save my marriage!) In this case the prof may have been talking only about the first chapters, or only about Foundations, or only about their own teaching style. I'm fairly certain that you will all run into situations during your education where two different instructors tell you two different answers to the same question. An open, curious mind, good researching skills, and flexibility really helps!! Sorry for the length of this - I'm an educator at heart. I want to see everyone not only make it through their education, but to excel at it, as well as in their profession.

As a pre-nursing instructor, I can tell you this: One of my best students delivered her baby on a weekend between the first physiology lab practical and the first physiology lecture exam. (She had explicit instructions from me not to go into labor in class, LOL.) She did miss the first lecture exam, whadda slacker, huh? but we had made previous arrangements for that. She went on to ace the course and was admitted to a very good program the next year. Several other students have done well in my classes despite having young children at home. Several have done well despite having all sorts of Real Life going on in the background. It can definitely work. You'll have more responsibilities than a 19-year old kid, but you also have more motivation, if you keep an undaunted attitude. It really helps to have a supportive husband, and I hope your fiance fits the bill. There will be times that you will need extra help with child care. If your husband believes in you and is willing to work as a team to make a better life for your family, half the battle is over. Congratulations on the little one and on the upcoming wedding!

If I've said odd things coming out of anesthesia, nobody's told me. Or, they didn't notice. I crack jokes as a way of handling situations where I'm nervous. Not dirty jokes. Just really baaaaaaad jokes. After my gall bladder surgery, the nurses started by proclaiming that I would need to stay overnight, that my surgeon always kept his patients overnight. After 40 minutes of my (lying down) stand-up routine, my doc came by to check and the nurse looked at him and said, "Please send her home!" But we digress. Several pages back, Crux1024 mentioned hearing pirate jokes from folks coming out of anesthesia. It begs the question: "Any good ones I haven't heard yet?!?"

Usually, that's the best time, apart from any published office hours. But it's a good idea to gauge your instructor's mood. Do they seem distracted? Are their eyes flicking to the door leading outside? Are they walking quickly away, forcing you to run and ask your question at the same time? Sometimes after class (especially a long one) the instructor just needs to sit down and have a drink of water or coffee for a moment. Sometimes they have another class scheduled in 15 minutes. One way to approach this is to ask after class, "When can we meet to discuss this?" If it's something small, I usually say, "Well, now's okay." If it's more involved, I might say, "How about meeting me in my office in 15 minutes, does that work?" Or I might ask if they can make my next office hour session. Some students came up to me 5 minutes before the end of open lab last weekend and asked if I would "introduce" the prosected cadaver to them (they won't start dissecting their assigned cadavers for another week or so). I asked them to wait until the next open lab, or to ask their instructor during regular lab. It was just too late to get started on cadavers. Anyway, ask, and be flexible, and remember that instructors are humans and get tired and busy too!

Well, the thread is wandering a little out of the classroom and into the clinic, but I want to say thank you to many of the responders who told of their classroom experiences, especially those who mentioned useful responses from the instructor. I am an instructor of A&P at the pre-nursing level. Most of my students plan to apply to nursing schools. If you look at my average anatomy class, probably half of them have no business going into nursing, but they haven't discovered that yet. It's a very inexperienced and occasionally immature group. And believe me, student questions are welcome, but the student who never stops asking questions is a real pain. I had one student (I'll call her CC for Chatty Cathy) a few semesters ago who started asking questions as soon as I walked in the room, before I was even to the front, and at breaks would follow me to the rest room and try to ask questions while I was using the facilities. I had another student in that class, a wonderful woman (WW) who is now well on her way to being a respiratory therapist, who finally had it out with the first student. WW intercepted CC as the latter tried to follow me to the bathroom and told her in no uncertain terms that she was being too demanding of my time, and that everyone was fed up with her. WW said things that I would lose my job for saying to a student, and ya just gotta love her for it! I've seen them all. The students who already know everything because they're a registered massage therapist or a personal trainer or they had a sister who knew a guy whose mother had leukemia. The students who skip all the laboratory write ups because they plan to "make it up" on extra credit points (it doesn't work that way!). The students who talk incessantly during lecture. The students who "lawyer" every missed point or complain that I'm giving no credit for a late assignment, even though I drop almost 1/3 of the lowest grades on homework! It's the gems that make teaching worthwhile. If you're a good student who respects the instructor, works to master the material, worries about your patients (but not too much), and finds the little bits of joy that exist in learning and being a health professional, please know that the instructors respect you in return, and we wish the best for you in your career.