Useless work?

LOL, only some? I can understand doing a full care plan occasionally, but doing them every single semester, is tedious. They are long and annoying, and tiresome, and apparently don't even reflect real world nursing care plans. By the last year of nursing school you are over them and will write down whatever b.s. you think your instructor wants to hear (always gotta stroke that ego!) Yeah, yeah, yeah "learning tool." I learn better by actually DOING. Not trying to rush through 6-12 hours of BUSYWORK so I don't fail clinical.

B.S is what it comes down too. I wonder when will someone (BON) decide to change the nursing curriculum to reflect real word experience then doing bogus busy work just to give nursing students something to do. I sometimes feel that if it was not for all of the useless busy work nursing school would not be so bad.

Honestly I don't think it would be. I spend FAR more time doing/agonizing over assignments (for no grade, just a maintenance to a course grade) than studying because they take an astronomical amount of time and detail. Yes, we do have to learn a lot in a short time span, but the amount of info we need to know for each test has never been unmanageable either IMO. The real killers are the care plans (tedious after the first year when you've done them 5,000 times), group projects (shudders), papers, assessment sheets, and whatever other useless piece of paper work the coordinators can dream up to torture students with.

I learn the most and the fastest on the job, aka, clinical. It's like learning to drive. You can read about it all you want, but you learn on the road and those are the experiences that cement it in your brain.

I'd rather spend an entire extra day in the hospital if it meant we could cut the crap.

No, I'm not hard set that the faculty is out to get me (I don't think I said that in my post)...just thinking that the curriculum can be adjusted to make better use of time. I like to work smarter not harder.

Hats off to you of you think learning about meds and disease processes is all you need to walk out on a floor and manage all of your patients with no issue.

Critical thinking is taught through care planning. It just is what it is. You can sit back, take it in, and maybe search for the silver lining that you're paying an arm and a leg (and a crap-load of time) for, or you can resent the process, feel miserable, and tune out what they're trying to help you internalize. If it was as easy as memorizing your patho text book, nursing school would be irrelevant.

Does it get overwhelming? Yes! But how do you think it's going to be when you're working in a hospital that implements a million policies that feel like they're just extra busy work while they're piling your patient load high? Based on all the posts I've read here, I can guarantee you that is going to happen.

Btw, self reflection may feel pointless, but it is so important. Be honest in them. Were you awesome? Did you suck? Be responsible for your process and performance. Allow yourself to grow, and recognize your growth. This is what we're in school to do.

While it is true that some assignments are time consuming and not part of our grade there is a reason for their madness. I really believe the instructors are testing our time-management and problem-solving skills, which we will need when we become nurses:-)

By doing all those tedious assignments along with doing well in tests we are demonstrating perseverance, patience and ability to multi-task. I don't mind the assignments. I find them easy compared to the tests!

Imagine you are a nurse and you have 4 patients under your care. Imagine those patients are a test, a paper, a care plan and a simchart. You have to care for all of them as you have to care for the 4 patients. One may need to be done and taken care of immediately, and the others can wait, but you still have to attend to all of them! Just breathe, do what they ask you too, and show them you are an efficient multi-tasking nurse-to-be:-)

I don't think of anything in nursing school as "busywork". I actually enjoy doing those care plans (OK, I'm only in my 4th week of clinicals, so it's still new to me, lol), and spend a lot of time thinking about those nursing diagnoses and what interventions would work best for my patient -- NOT just looking up stuff in the NANDA book and copying interventions that go with the diagnosis I picked. I like the challenge of solving a problem.

I'd rather write careplans than do statistics.

My program is full of busywork too. Right after group projects (which teach me nothing more than the fact that I HATE group projects, because my grade should not depend on some other moron that I don't even like!) on my hate-list are "concept maps". Who in the Sam Hill decided that cartoons are a good way to teach nurses anything?

Because that's what my school has -- cartoons. We are given a "legend" and a pre-formatted bunch of geometric shapes on a sheet of paper, and we need to "fill in the blanks" where it says to. Put PMH in the square. Put medications in the diamonds. Put nursing diagnoses in the ovals. Put interventions in the hexagons. Put evaluations in the trapezoids.

It's not set up as an algorithm type of chart. It's not set up as a "brainstorming" activity. All you do is make a careplan and then cut/paste the info into the shape they specify. How is that "teaching" me anything, other than how to follow directions that I've been able to follow since kindergarten?

But I'm on the downhill slope now... graduate in May 2013. WOOHOO!