If you could have an open, honest conversation with your instructors - classroom or clinical - what would you tell them?
Here are some of my thoughts:
(1) Please make sure that everyone follows the rules & meets the requirements. Don't let some students make their own rules while others work hard to follow every rule! While there are always times exceptions must be made, the same students are often getting away with everything.
(2) When I'm in clinical, please just step back and allow me to do the task I have to do. Don't stand over me asking questions! Your running commentary makes me a nervous wreck. As long as I'm doing my task correctly, observe & keep quiet! If I do something wrong, please explain it to me and give my another opportunity to prove I can do it.
(3) Please ensure your expectations are clear and consistant. If you want our weekly patient write-ups a certain way, tell us. Don't change your expectations without letting us know!! The bottom line: most of us are working so hard to do our best! Tell us what you want from us and we'll always do what we can to get a good grade!
1. I understand if I am not doing a procedure correctly, you may need to step in. However, I would appreciate you doing it with courtesy as the patient was not in danger and not yelling 'let go of that right now' in front of my fellow classmates and patient and family member.
If you had said instead "X, let me do this and I will go over with you later", I could have handled that..
Which by the way you never took the time to do! I had to ask. I would have thought if I had done something wrong, it would be explained to me if it was bad enough to take over from me.
2. When we have a private room to discuss my shortcomings, please use it instead of going over all my shortcomings of off the hall near in the nursing station in a loud voice. Esp. when you know I am aware of these issues and are working on them, it is not that I have denied I have these issues.
In other words, you have totally humiliated me and demolished my confidence when if you had handled this in a different way, I would have learned from the experience. Now I just feel crushed and totally incompetent. And just want to drop out right now.
1. The fact that you get so excited over a bowel elimination lecture is slightly disturbing. Was it really necessary to have three slides on different poop scales?
2. I don't mean to laugh during lectures. The drag on for over 2 hours after a huge test, I have nervous energy and you put me to sleep. Laughing is the only way I survive. I try to keep it in and I pretty much always stay quiet, but every now and then a giggle slips out.
3. The orthopedic shoes you wear are distracting when you wear them with a short dress and white stockings...you seem so unlikely to be wearing them
4. You can't expect us to follow some of these ridiculous rules if you ignore them right in front of us. Cell phone usage is just as bad if its you all using them....
To my clinical instructor:
Thank you for just throwing us in there and letting us do what we were capable of and not doubting us. You treat us like the adults we are and that is refreshing.
But if you expect us to be there at 6:45 am...please do the same. We live as far away as you do and still make it there on time, despite the fact we're up all night doing drug cards and care plans.
To the instructor of first half of second semester's clinicals: Please tell Stephanie to kindly shut up about her marital problems, namely her husband's incessant appetite for sex and her lack of desire for it. I don't like her and having to listen to her histrionic displays several times per day twice a week makes me fantasize about doing even meaner things to her than I already fantasize about doing. Other than that, you're an awesome guy and I have a bit of a crush on you. Thanks in advance!
To my first clinical instructor: I hate you. I hate you with the burning passion of a thousand suns. You made me feel stupid and incompetent, of which I am neither. I am a student with zero hands-on experience in patient care. I am here to learn. I know nothing about this situation I have been thrust into and as an instructor, it is up to you to guide me - not act as if I'm bothering you. I am going to remember your attitude towards me on every evaluation I write about you until the day I graduate.
To my current clinical instructor: Not many people can pull off cynical situational humor without sounding like they hate their job and would rather be at the dentist getting a xanax and nitrous-free root canal than supervising students. Unfortunately, you are not one of those people.
To my physical assessment instructor: You are sassy and awesome and knowledgeable and competent. I want to be you when I grow up.
Specializes in keeping all options open right now..
For my clinical instructors:
- Please stop teaching us what they do in the 'real world' when we get out of the program. It isn't going to help me on the NCLEX, and it isn't what the instructor is telling us. We have to learn it by the book before we can 'cut corners safely'.
- Please remember that we jump into clinical before we actually cover the specific subject matter (ie- Obstetrics/Peds) Okay, maybe I should have read the ENTIRE TEXTBOOK before attending clinical, but I don't understand any of it until we discuss it in lecture.
- Please stop the knee jerk response of 'look it up' whenever I ask you a question. I obviously don't know what ____ means, could you give me something a little more encouraging, or at least someplace to start? How do I know where to look it up if I don't even know what it is to begin with?
- Please consider the fear and apprehension I have when doing something for the first time on a 'live' person, and don't jump to the conclusion that I don't know what I'm doing and I should never have gotten this far in the program with my lack of skills...at least give me the few seconds to realize and correct my non-lethal, non-injurous error before you jump all over me. I've practiced this a thousand hours on a mannequin, its drastically different on a moving, breathing, talking person.
- can we all get on the same boat when it comes to care maps? Can you give us a fictitious example of what YOU want from us? don't tell us generalities, and then when we do one the way the last instructor wanted it, you tear it all to pieces with hardly a kind word anywhere.
For the instructors:
- Yes, I realize that EVERYTHING is going to be on the NCLEX, and its all fair game. But if it isn't in your lecture (I have every one recorded, just in case...) and it isn't in the required textbooks/workbooks, why are you testing us on it? how can we know that you are expecting us to know things from other books (that aren't at our disposal) unless you tell us?
- If you (or the majority of the teaching staff for the nursing program) don't know how to do the med calcs, how can you expect us to listen to what you want? Round to this...label it this way...and then next semester, the rules change because that particular professor wants it a different way?
- Please don't brush off a topic as "well, I'm not going to expect you to know that aspect of it...you'd have to know it if you were going into _____ as a specialty", and then test us extensively on the minutiae of the subject, as if we were going for that specialty?
For the administration:
- Please communicate with the students, and as important, THE STAFF of what is or isn't. How can we as students be blamed for not knowing something was important if the staff didn't realize we were supposed to know about it? (ie- orientations to the hospitals for clinicals that we had to attend, but dates/times weren't posted, no notices were emailed, and professors and clinical instructors didn't even know about?
- Stop worrying sooooooo much about how the numbers look of how many passed the NCLEX and pay more attention to how the students are doing up to that point. Sure, it's great to show the world and the State that you have a 98% pass rate for the NCLEX...but when you start off the program with 90+ students, and only 30 get to the point where they can sit for the NCLEX, how wonderful is that pass rate now? ALL STUDENTS should be getting the pat on the back, not just the top 2% that you've taken a liking to.
Pleeeeeeeeaaaasssssee put the plastic baby down during lecture. Watching you stand in front of class holding a swaddled plastic baby for 3 hours while you lecture from a powerpoint kills me:uhoh3: especially when your not using it to show an assessment & we are not in skills lab. ITS NOT A REAL BABY!!! I still love ya though:bugeyes:
To my Peds Instructor:
Don't ever stand behind the podium (spelling?) during lecture. Your only 4 feet tall & you disappear behind that thing. It cracks me up
To all the Instructors:
Can you please not give us practice NCLEX questions from 1994 & when we review them the answers back then are not the same answers that they would be today. You can't convince me that the NCLEX has not changed in 14years when you tell us some of the answers are different today:nono: C'mon can we at least get some questions from 2000. Good thing I got my own up to date NCLEX book!
Please stop reading us notes directly from the powerpoint. Add a little spice to it give a lil story here and there. Whats the point of coming to class just to sit and look at a powerpoint for 4 hours especially when its the exact one you post on blackboard. Your putting me to sleep:zzzzz. In that case I could download it & teach myself at home. Boy oh boy if we didn't have an attendance policy Id probably take some of those days off:yawn:
Also when we have an exam @ 8 on monday morning & then lecture for the rest of the day until 4 sitting in the same seat all day please realize that our brains are FRIED from studying all weekend & we don't really want to be there after the test nor have we actually comprehended the new material that we were suppose to study that will be covered that day (some of us haven't even looked at it). We all look like zombies & you know we are not really interested in what you saying (too busy wondering what we got on the test) so stop asking questions on the new material while the crickets chirp in the room. Just get on with the lecture. We will go home that night & catch up on the reading:stone
Can you please not give us practice NCLEX questions from 1994 & when we review them the answers back then are not the same answers that they would be today. You can't convince me that the NCLEX has not changed in 14years when you tell us some of the answers are different today:nono: C'mon can we at least get some questions from 2000. Good thing I got my own up to date NCLEX book!
You'd be surprised. We just took HESI and there was a question about Yutopar on it. They stopped giving Yutopar years ago.
Our instructor reviewed the test before we took it to make sure the information was accurate. She noticed this question and asked them to remove it and they refused. So bless her heart, she taught us what we needed to know about Yutopar and as far as I know, we all got it right.
So, yeah, there might really be information on the test from 1994.
To one in particular: Thank you for building my confidence when I thought I was going to crumble. Your caring personality and desire for us to succeed, combined with your little compliments here and there really made me feel that I could do this, that I could really be a nurse, and a good one too!
To others: Thank you for being caring when you were caring. Thank you for being rude when you were irrational. Thank you for allowing me to grow a thicker skin, because I certainly needed one. Thank you for reminding me that I am a STUDENT, I am learning, and it's okay not to know everything. Most of all, thank you for allowing me to grow.
1) I am fully capable of reading. Please do not read to me directly from the text or the powerpoint. You make me feel like I am an incompetent child. Just tell me the really important stuff and I'll be satisfied.
2) Speaking of reading, please do not just read directly off your lecture "cheat sheet." If you do not understand or cannot remember the five hundred complicated disease processes that you are lecturing on, I am surely not going to ace it all in a week. By the way, learn your lab values.
3) Please stop telling students that they cannot make it through the program if they have a job or children or a spouse or even a dog. This does not uplift our spirits. The majority of us that have families or jobs are busting our backs trying to do well. In fact, we usually do better than those with none of the responsibilies listed above.
4) Thank you to those two fabulous instructors that I have had the honor of meeting. Thank you for not frowning upon my use of appropriate humor with patients that need an uplifting moment. Thank you for standing up for me. Most of all, thanks for believing in me. I owe a lot of my success to you both.
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Kiringat
239 Posts
Why don't you have to show up on time?!?!?!?!?!