TC3200

I don't think it's farfetched. I used to work the QC lab of a foundry that made huge heavy section cast iron parts for wind turbines, mining, rock crushing, etc. Those are cast in huge molds made of sand and resins. There was black carbon dust everywhere. Even though I was in the lab, I walked though the foundry a lot during the course of a day. Fine black dust stuck on my clothes and ended up on the tan leather upholstery of my car. It was an interesting study to watch the buildup just from fines being picked up on my clothes. I put a seat cover on the driver's seat. So, yes, your seat and arm rest and anything else that contact your work clothes is getting deposits of whatever is on your work clothes. I don't think it's crazy to disinfect the car. I always travel with Lysol wipes or a knockoff thereof.

Why didn't they just listen to the trained medical professionals who told them the truth back in October. July has been like watching two people who've lost their marbles. They act like they are on autopilot or something, like they never listened to anything their medical team surely, by now, has told and retold them a dozen and one times. I can't help wondering if Connie Yates (in particular) keeps trying to prolong the inevitable in order to avoid having to face the future. Her relationship with Chris Gard may end after Charlie's death. I hope they both have a good support system, but I worry most about her. She already looks like walking skeleton and the biggest crash hasn't even happened yet. If they break up after this, she goes back to ... What? Motherhood and a houseful of children with some other man? Single again, trying to reenter the dating scene? Throw herself into her career (she doesn't appear to have one, because "carer" seems to be generally an unpaid caregiver for immediate family or disabled child, and receives a government allowance for the only the duration of that gig.) See what I mean? Blasting your personal life all over the Internet, and this time, literally all over the WORLD, no privacy. Hell on Earth to me. But maybe it doesn't bother the younger generation so much. I just think some things ought to be private, not social media fodder.

I'll preface this by saying I was in a diploma school that enrolled a cohort of 65-75 students EVERY year, if they could find that many students. But they only graduated a class of 25-35 students, at most, consistently over the recent 4 years I have made it my business to track that school. That 25-25 is a mix of the original cohort, plus failed students from the previous year who were permitted to resume the program and repeat the failed term, plus a select few who'd either failed out or just plan transferred in from other area diploma schools. So, that means that the school actually fails MORE than 50% of the cohort, and since they have a consistent pattern of doing so, they actually INTEND to significantly whittle the size of a cohort. This could be due to the realities of the job market, meaning shrinking opportunities for their diploma grads to get hired. But since the diploma school has also consistently fed diploma grads to several area RN-BSN bridge degree programs, I believe the real reasons for this are 1) the hospital does not have the capacity to handle cohorts of greater that 25-35 students in Year 2, when students go into the more intense med-surg clinicals and capstone projects, and 2) enrolling such a large cohort generates double the revenue stream in Term 1, and this probably doesn't drop off much until much closer to the end of Year 1. Money in the bank for the school, and a raw deal for the >50% that will not graduate. One of the tactics I firmly believe that school used to flunk people out was exams like you describe. Since I have other college degrees and 24 years of engineering experience for a major corporation, I can say that in ANY OTHER college degree or workforce development program, having 100% of students fail an exam would be inexcusable and whomever designed such and exam would be called on the carpet. NEVER would the students be blamed. Possibly lawsuits would be filed, since people's GPAs and future careers and financial aid and financial solvency are at stake. In other words, effery abounds in nursing schools, and rarely does the nursing school get the bad press and the public flogging it deserves. Instead, people choose to believe that the students have legitimately failed, and that this process of weeding out students via underhanded treachery and blatant fraud somehow ensures that only the truly deserving students go on to become RNs. As a mature adult, I can recognize a crock of stinking excrement without having to delve too deeply into it. >;-) When I talked to the top students in my class who were managing to stay afloat, they all said their strategy was to NOT waste time reading the texts. They all said that what they did was simply go over and over and over the material that was covered in lectures and didn't even bother with the rest. You needed 80% to pass, and better than 80% of test material came from lecture handouts and notes, they said. (I on the other hand, did dutifully try to read and study and also RETAIN every bit of textbook assignment and lecture notes were were assigned, to physical and mental exhaustion and beyond. and my grades did nothing but fall.) Ymmv. But just be advised that there may games at play here, and students need to think strategically and not just naively that the school has the best interests of all of you at heart. In cases like this, maybe students and parents need to get attorneys involved, and also need to go to the local Workforce retraining personnel at (usually) the local unemployment office, and make them all aware of it when something very odd like this happens.

Can you get a new-grad RN job where you live or where you intend to live, with "just" a diploma RN? Or would you need a BSN to be hired as RN? LTC facilities in TX still hire new-grad diploma RNs with no experience. Hospitals in more rural areas may or may not still hire new-grad diploma RNs. Hospitals in urban areas with a glut of new-grad college BSNs can afford to be snobby and make BSN their entry-level. What state are you in? Western PA still has loads of diploma RN programs within 100 miles of Pittsburgh, and all of them that I looked at in 2010-2012 had just as much actual non-RN science and gen-ed college credits as the community college ADN programs, but the actual nursing courses were all hospital-based. That was the only real difference. All of the grads of diploma RN schools in western PA who have valid RN licenses are eligible for bridge programs from diploma RN to BSN. Most but not all of the local hospitals still wanted to hire the top half of the diploma school RN grads, because the local diploma grads had more actual floor experience than some of the university BSNs, and/or had already worked years as LPNs or CNAa and thus were easier to transition into the hospital's workforce. Everyone that I know who got a diploma RN in 2012-2015 who completed a RN/BSN bridge program said: 1. The bridge BSN degree did not teach ANY new bedside nursing / clinical skills whatsoever. It was all theory, research, and public health, and just writing, writing, writing a metric shite tonne of papers. All of the bedside skills they needed had been well-taught by the diploma program. 2. All of those diploma RNs attended BSN school while working full-time, and their employers paid all or majority of the cost for the BSN bridge degree, regardless of how outrageously expensive some of those programs were at private colleges. 3. All said that compared to the stressfullness and the relentless strain of maintaining a passing grade in our diploma RN school (that had a curriculum that veered all over the road and ran clinicals as almost a totally separate set of rotations that were not synced with the lectures), the BSN bridge programs were monotonous and tedious but easy-peasy. I didn't finish the program I was enrolled in, because I decided that nursing is not a good fit for me. But all of my diploma school cohort who did finish passed NCLEX-RN and found jobs, albeit some of them moved out he western PA to do so. I think the majority of those just wanted to leave the stodgy Rust Belt anyhow and RN offered a very portable ticket out. In terms of actual. training, the diploma schools were able to give students avenues into clinical experiences that the community colleges could not, just because the hospitals can and do offer more weighty clinical experiences to their own students just because a) It's part of the marketing strategy to overcome the diploma stigma vs. college ADN, and b) They own the facilities so they can do as they please when they please and do not have to beg and plead for clinical sites the way the community colleges do. The only clinical deficit that I experienced at my diploma RN school was they had no actual children at that hospital for pediatrics, so all of that except mother/baby consisted of sim lab work and practice on mannequins. The reason for that was that the other local hospital that they had formerly partnered with for pediatrics changed their policy to "We don't hire any new-grad diploma RNs anymore, so therefore, our facilities will no longer be available for diploma schools to use for their clinicals.

Here in Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, every county has a vo-tech that offers LPN that can be completed in 1 year or less. It's a trade school type degree that doesn't transfer to college credit later. We have at least one community college that offers LPN as a college degree and the courses in it transfer into the associate degree RN program at that same college. Accelerated BSN would be a whole different animal from LPN. You'd probably have to complete prereqs to get accepted and then once you're in the accelerated program is very rigorous itself. I'm not sure why people suggested that. In rural areas of PA, and other place s clamoring for RNs, like Texas, it's not difficult for a diploma school RN or ADRN to land a jobin hospitals or LTC. In the urban areas, the hospitals got picky because they have a glut of new BSNs to pick from and they won't hire a new-grad who is less than a BSN, and they might have requirements that their diploma and AD RN employees complete BSN by a certain deadline to keep their jobs. Pay for a new-grad LPN in my rural are was $15/hr back in 2011. A new-grad RN was more like $22-$25. But, down in the Pittsburgh and Washington, PA areas some of the nursing home and LTCs were paying LPNs anywhere from $19 to $22/hr. Some people that I know went to LPN school and then got jobs and started on a BSN as soon as possible and had employer paying for the majority or all of it. Hospitals here, even in this rural area, have for the most part booted out the LPNs and one needs to be RN to get a hospital job other than CNA. I was told by the LPN schools that LPNs mostly work in LTC and we should expect that hospitals would not be hiring LPNs.

I don't have time to read through all of the pages of this thread. But, what women who have been nurses for decades forget is that those of us who have had less physically demanding jobs for those decades are a lot fresher in our 50s because we haven't had all of that nursing wear and tear. I completed all college prereqs and a full year of hospital based diploma RN school. I threw in the towel and decided that RN isn't for me, but it surely wasn't the physical demands of it that turned me off. I just didn't like dealing with the lower caliber of people comprising the general public, after decades of working in engineering, computers, and industry. Y'know, a work environment that isn't full of losers, liars, addicts, welfare mamas, and criminals. There were several older women and a couple of older men in my cohort. As far as I know, none of the career-changers age 45 or greater had any problem landing jobs. The oldest woman was in her early 60s and she went into hospice nursing, but she said all along that was her goal. One went into psych. The hospital itself had a rule that no employee lifts more than 35#. In theory, that was great, but in practice, I suspect it might not always work out that way. I had no problems performing the physical requirements of clinicals. I did find that choice of shoe is very important to my feet, but I'd have the same problem in teaching or retail or any job that requires walking around on concrete floors all the time. The emotional wear and tear was too much for me, personally. I am too much on an introvert who likes to just work and not be bothered by people, so you can see why nursing would wind up feeling like taking a whipping all the time. lol

No, they don't want find out. They are just very convinced of their power to force their values and preferences onto other people, and make other people bend to their will. That may have worked on doting parents, but it won't work on everyone and it usually doesn't work in the dating world or the workplace. If you are "trouble" or "look weird" and can easily be replaced by some less controversial person, you will be passed over or replaced. Just as the tattoo devotees have a right to their opinion that tatts are fantastic and should be allowed everywhere, OTHER PEOPLE have an equally valid right to think tatts are inappropriate or ill-advised or unattractive or low-class. You can try to make the whole world conform to your opinions, but don't be surprised at the backlash you'll eventually experience. This tattoo nonsense has been around so long that a lot of people, myself included, just look at tattoos as more booring foolishness, more Look-at-MEEEEEEEEE.

I think YOU are the one who missed the point of Heinz57's post, which is don't do something that you might regret later. You sound blissfully ignorant, lol. Don't do something that could handicap you. My mother told us kids "If everyone jumped in the lake, would you jump in the lake?" Sure, tatts may be hot or mainstream now. That doesn't mean they will *always* be in vogue or mainstream throughout time. Rudee Vallee's megaphone crooning music was real popular in the 1930s, but I bet comparatively few people like it nowadays. This is to all of those who insist on following the crowd: IF you want to ink yourself all up, the fact is that you do so at your own risk. Put aside a large sum of money that you can use for tatt removals later, because one day you just might get sick and tired of those tatts and want them gone. Cher was one of the first women who tatted herself up, back in what, the early '80s? To me, tattoos are just old hat now. Tiresome, hackneyed, unnecessary. At a glance, many of them look like dirt on skin. I can't help looking at photos of even the '90s and seeing how much CLEANER the tattoo-free people look. That natural skin just looks OH SO MUCH MORE ATTRACTIVE to me. Other people have mentioned that patients may adversely react to tattoos, too. But, hey, it's your body. You can pump it full of unregulated tattoo pigments from God knows where, to your heart's content, but don't come crying around when fashions change or you get some illness from heavy metals, or someone who'd make a good spouse passes you by for marriage material, or you look like Hades when you're 75. Because all we conservative people are going to say is "I told you so."

I think that too many nursing schools have realized that this type of student is their future. If mom & dad or spouse can't pay, and there are no grants, and the reality is that MOST of the students are non-traditional older students and career-changers with other obligations, schools must change with the times. The keep-away game, where nursing instructors try to weed out students they deem "unsuitable," has to end. And schools will have to start teaching in a way that makes for a more efficient learning experience for students, instead of purposely trying to weed out students.

Take a good look at the LPN program. Is it set up to be a feeder into RN or BSN degrees? I'm in Pennsylvania. There is one community college near me that offers a LPN degree, and that's a rarity here. That LPN degree is structured so that all of the credits in it will transfer to their associate degree R.N. program. Most would transfer to another school's BSN program. If you are looking at an associate degree program like that, then maybe it's worth considering because you'd still be doing coursework for the BSN, in essence. But in general, many associate degrees contain special associate degree courses that won't transfer into any baccalaureate degree whatsoever. We also have, in western PA and NE OH, vo-techs and trade schools offering LPN programs that take only 1 year to complete and are very affordable. But they are not college degree programs. Maybe all that a college or university will give a student transfer credit for is Nursing I, and that's only if the student can pass a proficiency test. If you want to go on for BSN, and the LPN coursework won't transfer, then you should just pursue RN.

I have two friends who finished the diploma RN school in Pennsylvania that I attended but didn't finish. Both were grausated in Dec 2012 and passed NCLEX-RN soon after. One stayed in that town, got a RN job in ER, and finished her BSN while working fulltime. She became a travel nurse to pay off her school loans. She took an assignment in South Carolina, I believe, as her first travel job. Then she went to LA. The pay is good and there is plenty of work. Experience + BSN worked for her. Another didn't find work in PA immediately after school and NCLEX. She lived in a small town and worked for Krispy Creme and Victoria's Secret. She used those two retailers to relocate (at her expense) to Texas near Dallas and began working two retail jobs there. Then she easily got an entry-level RN job at a nursing home with just her diploma RN. After a little more than a year, she had enough experience to land a hospital job. As far as I know,m she has taken no steps to start a BSN. Obviously she's not in Los Angeles, but she overcame obstacles and lack of jobs in decaying PA and moved to a more prosperous urban area.

Class of 2015. This diploma school has consistently graduated a class of about 30-35 from 2012 to current, even after curriculum changes. Buyer beware. It's sink or swim there. Starting a class of 60-65 students and finishing 30-35 including transfers-in and returning students who failed the previous year seems suspicious to me. Also, the director Gaye Falletta is retiring. She was the one that THW hired in 2011 to replace the one they fired in 2011. That may bode more changes, but they could be improvements, to be fair.

It's pretty much a fallacy for many people to think that "retirement is just around the corner." Unless one has a large nestegg or is a broken down wreck at 65, there's no real reason to ever quit work that you can do competently. Remember, the retirement age 65 was set decades ago in a time when many people died in their 40s or 50s and relatively few even made it to age 65. Age 30 is nothing. Change your career. Enjoy life.

Religion class doesn't sound like a huge workload on the prof. Talk to the prof and see if he or she will allow an extra student in the class. You have to figure there's always one who drops out or drops at the last minute when they can't pay.

I just read something the other day (actually, several articles online) that said med schools across the board were expanding to be able to admit larger classes. It you're interested, go for it. There's always an emphasis on family practice. I know several DOs who got admitted to med school by saying they wanted to be GPs in a rural area. Then they became specialists in large urban areas.

Rates depend on what your local cc charges. Butler BC3.EDU here is really low for Butler county residents. $141 / credit, full time $1,500 + $41 Per Credit outside Butler county $241/credit, full time $3,000 + $41 Per Credit Add $25/credit for online courses. Add a one time lab fee $35 per lab course. Beaver county is higher for non-beaver county ccbc.edu Maricopa online might offer courses that cost you less. I paid about $600 for 3cr Soc101 from them, back in 2011.

Gee. It sounds like there's enough steady workload there for the facility to hire a second sonographer if not a third. Then at least TWO of the graduates would have found jobs. Or, they could attach and apartment to that unit so the on-call sonographer can just live there fulltime. (snort!) This inadequate staffing s^%& in the medical field (and other places) is getting ridiculous. No time for pee breaks? No time for meal break? Ridiculous. TAKE your breaks. Let the employer figure out how to cover it.

And even if you didn't get a hospital R.N. job or your nursing "dream job," you'd still be a R.N. (associate or diploma, which is usually as much college as ADN plus has more actual clinical hours), making R.N. wages which will go a long way toward paying cash for that BSN bridge. Your employer may even pick up the tab for all or part of it. Grads from the many diploma schools in western PA moved south to the Carolinas and TX and got R.N. jobs without much trouble. Some of them had to go to work in nursing homes or facilities other than hospitals. But they did get hired without a BSN.

Okay, I might not have described it quite that way, lol. But it does bring up a valid point: They have started to look unsanitary to me. I'm not sure how, when, or why I started to have that reaction to tatts. I didn't set out to develop a dislike of tattoos. It just sneaked up on me. I definitely have that kind of strong negative reaction to them now. I was looking through old photos the other day, and I thought it was very refreshing to see nothing but tattoo-free people who look CLEAN. Stare? Yes, of course people will stare at it. Have to, to see what the design is. I can tell your eye color in a fraction of a second, but I'd have to stare at a tattoo a while. That's if I wanted to actually see what it is. People called them "not cutting edge anymore." And that is so true. Cher tatted herself up in what, early '80s or so? Everyone and their Aunt Debbie in my town is now a copycat sporting full sleeves and tatts running up and down their legs. It's TOO MUCH. I'm weary of seeing it. Blanking go scrub it off. I just want to see clean natural skin, quiet and restful. Having had psych patients go off at something that bothered them about my earrings or something I said, I sure as heck would not want to have one jump me because he or she thought my tattoo creatures were swimming out to poke his/her eyes out or something. Be careful out there. Being bland means making yourself less of a target on all fronts.

One thing that definitely needs to be done, since new RNs need to hit the ground running, is the RN education has to be revamped to cut the crap and teach how to do the job of nursing. The days of RN programs turning out new grads who are not a finished product need to be gone. Nursing has to drop the "women-speak" and circuitous pathways and start using some of the pages out of those bean counter's books. You are going to be continually pushed to be more efficient, so you might as well get used to that. Sure, hospitals try to replace high-cost labor with lower-cost labor. But you veteran nurses should also examine how you do patient care, vs. what the new-grads are being taught. Example: Knowing the realities of today's short-staffing and cost-cutting, since I come from engineering and tech where efficiency has always been paramount, I thought the RN school was wasting far too much time talking about religion and counseling and diversity and NOT doing enough drill and rote about how to "think like a nurse" and make decisions. Sure, maybe back in the day you'd have time to be Mother Teresa, but in today's "assembly line" world, you are, in reality, performing more of a technician role. I felt that I had a real accurate picture of the modern and future RN role, but the school was doing a woefully inefficient job of wasting my time on blather and crap instead of teaching me exactly how to do the job of floor nurse in today's modern bean-counting, cost-cutting hospital. So, I quit.

Western PA has many of them, and you might want to look at the Pittsburgh area. New Castle, Jameson Hospital Sharon, Sharon Regional Hospital in conjunction with local Penn State branch (check on that one) Washington, The Washington Hospital SON Pittsburgh area: Ohio Valley Hospital Mercy Hospital Shadyside Hospital Citizens SON @ Allegheny Hospital, New Kinsington St. Margaret, offered at Blawnox and McKeesport There may be others. Those are the ones I can name without looking them up. Sharon Regional Hospital was bought by a conglomerate, and I think part of the restructuring involved changes to the nursing school. Of Jameson and Sharon Regional, Jameson was felt to be the better of the two. I was at Washington for one year of the two-year program. That school starts a large class, like 60-70 students, and it's b__buster of a program that ties up a lot of TIME in class and saddles you with huge workload out of class. They have graduated SMALL classes, like 30-35 students for about the past three years. A 50% or higher flunkout/dropout/quit rate is far too high, imo. But that's the way they run it. They make a lot of money for about a year on the 30-35 that don't make it through, I guess. Their grads didn't have any problems finding jobs. Most stayed in the area. One moved to TX and got her first RN job there. Today's diploma programs have just as much if not more college coursework as any associate degree RN program. The diploma students get a lot of clinical experiences because the hospital based schools can do whatever they want, and most of them have satellite facilities for say, peds, or wound care, or hospice care, LTC/geriatrics, or other specialties. TWH SON program had us in school 5 days per week, analogous to how the old diploma schools had students on campus and/or working in the hospital all the time. As you progressed into the 2nd year, more of your days were full-day clinical hands-on work v.s more of it being lecture time in 1st year. You did 12-hour shifts and lots of actual patient care, especially in year 2. imo, the more time you spend on the floor in school, the better you will be prepared for the real work world. Apparently the area's hospitals felt that way, but even they are mandating that after a cutoff all new grads must be BSN. The college programs offer the advantage of block schedules. And colleges and universities have to be accountable to lots more people than diploma RN school director and instructors do. In TWH SON, the clinicals ran as a separate program, almost. The lectures included the entire class and thus everyone was getting the same lecture material, at same time, and same progression of topics. But the clinicals were ROTATIONS, based on availability of the hospital's facilities not sync'd with the lectures. Example: Everyone had to do a clinical on labor/delivery/newborn sometime in that semester, obviously not all 65 students could do that at the same time. So, some of us had to do that particular BEFORE we'd ever had that material in lecture, some were lucky and got theirs concurrent with the lectures, and some didn't get to do that clinical until months after we'd covered the material in lecture. Summary: Going to that school was like going to 2 different RN schools at once. I hated it. They hated me. I am not a random person. I came from engineering and tech, and the randomness and "woman-think" of that particular diploma school made it a MISERABLE experience for me. I think I would have been better off at any college program, actually, because I have had a lot of college and the fixed schedule and days or partial days off that college would have allowed me. Having to sit in lecture all day and then sit at home all night grinding away at coursework does not work for me. I can't sit sit sit like that!

That's what I said in R.N. school back in 2011, and that was before ebola, even: The personnel protection available in the average hospital is not worth squat. And the mythical powers of hand-washing are highly overrated. And hospital administrators, if they are just bean counters and business degrees, are NOT the people to be making decisions about how to run hospitals now.

Did the hospital even have enough grounds to detain or admit him at that first visit? Apparently not, or they would have done it or at least called the CDC for advice. Hindsight is always 20/20. I'm disturbed by just how much criticism is being leveled at the hospital and just how little is being leveled at the now-deceased Thomas Eric Duncan. Hospitals and medical personnel are not mind-readers. And they are hobbled by Administration's insistence on pleasing the patients and getting good customer satisfaction ratings. Thomas Eric Duncan knew EXACTLY where he was in the weeks prior to being admitted, he knew he'd been toting around a now-deceased pregnant woman age 19 who died of EBOLA! Ebola, no doubt about that whatsoever! Yet he failed to be completely open and totally honest with the healthcare personnel. If he'd called the hospital ahead, or, hey, even called the CDC about himself, and said "I really think I have ebola and here is why I think that..." his case would have been handled differently. But Duncan apparently danced around the issue and presented insufficient grounds for the hospital to either admit him and/or report him to the CDC. And y'know, considering that hospital was probably unprepared for this scenario and didn't have dedicated isolation facilities to handle it, I can see where the admins' push for customer satisfaction and the insider's information re. lack of appropriate facilities and also the realization that they don't want to expose all the OTHER patients there to ebola, made a perfect storm, a no-win situation. If they had insufficient grounds to call it ebola and to detain him, they had to let him go. And it's all because Duncan didn't tell the whole truth. (Then when they had to admit him, they apparently created an isolation unit out of one entire floor?? That's what think I read, anyhow.) Mr. Duncan seems to be a bit of a shady character. Supposedly he came to USA to marry his old girlfriend. Maybe I am projecting too much into the snippets reported in the news, but I suspect he was a bit of a shyster and he wanted to bail out of Liberia and find a place in the USA real fast. So he might have called up the mom of his now-grown son an given her a real song and dance just so he had a place to run to when he left Liberia. Heck, maybe Duncan knew he was going to die anyway, so he thought he'd come to America and take as many Americans as possible along with him! Now, here's what I think: Now we have all started to see and further imagine what sacrificing too much control on the altar of customer satisfaction gets us. Hospitals, if they are smart, will use this ebola incident as grounds to jerk that power back into their own hands, protect their own valuable and skilled employees from death and physical harm that rolls in via jerks like Thomas Eric Duncan, and start running their medical facilities like disease-fighting institutions again, and tell patients "MY way or the highway. Take your pick. It's a hospital, not a hotel. Here are the rules. We make them; you don't." One of the things that really ground my gears as student nurse, and that, bluntly, caused me to bail out of nursing, was what I still consider inadequate personnel protection and lack of regard for my own personal health and safety. If I had stayed the course and completed the program and become an R.N., I would be leaving the profession right about now because I do not place the patient satisfaction above my (and my friends and family) own personal health and safety. Nobody can look out for Number 1 like Number 1, Nurses. Remember that.

I used a GED math review book to re-teach myself all of the algebra that I learned in high school. I don't have any problems with English and grammar. But you might browse some of the GED English & grammar books to see if you think they'd be helpful. I had only one term of general biology in high school, 9th grade, lol. I took microbiology in college. I bought a Cliff's Notes Biology book at a discounter and used that to study biology. I took all of the online practice tests that I cold find, too. Practice taking tests. It makes you better at them.

Yeah, it is dysfunctional in the extreme. And downright abusive, from an adult's perspective. Nursing school admission letters ought to come with a red rubber-stamped disclaimer on them that says "This will be the most hostile and dysfunctional and disrespectful educational experience of your life." I fought with my school over numerous deficiencies on their part, and was actually kicked out on three "conducts" because of it. I am over 50 and have worked in the real world of engineering since I was 21. To anyone who has actual work experience in careers where gender-neutrality and respect for ALL employees is part of the culture, the culture nursing is completely dysfunctional and unacceptable, a hostile work environment in the extreme. The issue of blatantly shoddy and inadequate personnel protection that I carped about nonstop to my RN school is coming to the forefront now with the ebola virus found in a person who has been freely walking around in the USA. (neener, neener, neener, to my former Nursing School -- I was miles out ahead of you, thinking ahead to the next step, the way I have been trained to.) If you still really want to be a nurse, OP, then find a different school or else wait it out and give them a song and dance about how you've reflected upon the errors of your ways and have learned from your mistakes and are so much more mature and blah, blah. That nursing instructor who mocked you might have just not liked the tone of your voice or something. I have a niece in her 20s who still talks baby-talk in a little-girl voice, and I'd like to just slap her every time she uses that little whiny or singsong voice. Take stock of your mannerisms and voice and language and if you are not "adult," then change. Otherwise, take that "you were not meant to be a nurse" statement as a compliment and a signal that you are smart enough to not be anyone's doormat, at least not as a fulltime career. lol