Tissue advice needed.

Reading your post made me so glad that I am done with anatomy...the tissues are the worst!!! Especially in the beginning, because they really do look alike. As you go through the course, you will start to see subtle differences.

For my class, we had a lab practical (actually we had two), and of the 50 questions, probably 6 or 7 were slides of tissue. I learned the main tissues and assumed we would be tested on tissues that had fairly distinguishing characteristics. For example, you may think that smooth muscle looks like cardiac muscle, and in a way, they are very similar, but cardiac muscle has intercalated discs. Once you can pick that out, you are good to go on muscle tissue. Bone tissue is very easy to identify. I was also fairly sure we would be tested on the epithelial tissues--of course we had simple squamous, but we also had simple columnar (again, fairly easy to tell the difference).

The fact that you took pictures will make it much easier for you to study. Just print the pictures and turn them into flash cards. Try to think of something that the tissue looks like (one of our blood cell slides looked like cherry blossoms on the trees). When you can make connections that way, it becomes much easier when tested.

I also looked up pictures of tissue online (so I had another picture of the same thing) and made flash cards with those. It helped to see each tissue from a couple of pictures and made it easier to tell the difference.

I don't know how tough your professor is (mine was pretty tough, but she was very fair). The truth is, we will probably never need to identify tissues under the microscope in our career, so hopefully your prof will be a little easier on these topics and test you on the main tissue types. Good luck!

Here is a website I found useful

http://www.gwc.maricopa.edu/class/bio201/histoprc/prac1q.htm

Hope this helps

Go to

http://www.histology-world.com/

Click on "Learn Histology".

Take all of her quizzes.

Look at all of her slides.

Listen to all of her explanations.

Repeat as needed until you can recognize the tissues fairly quickly.

Bow to the Histology Goddess.

Ace your exam.

Now wasn't that easy? :)

You can also go to youtube.com and search for educational videos on just about anything. I just typed in "epithelial tissue" and this was the first thing that popped up, but there was alot more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OT_qilIntY

I have used youtube to help me understand anything from nerve synapses to wathching the blood flow through the heart. It's very helpful to wach it live versus looking at pictures and still slides.

Definitely making flash card of the tissues help. Also trying to remember key features that at least get you in the ballpark - for example, all the cartilage has the cells in lacunae so they kind of look like they are in a bubble. At least then you know you are in the cartilage. The epidermal tissues to me were identified by their cells being stuck close together, so that narrows it down, then it is just a case of remembering the different types of cells. I also used the lecturers terms for things - he called hyaline cartilage 'jello' with bubbles, collagen fibers were wavy paint rollers on a wall, elastic fiber paint brush lines and reticular were ballpoint pen lines (in other words thick, thin and very thin). Stupid things like this helped my brain make the transition from layman's terms recognition to being able to associate things with the correct terminology.

Hope that helps!