My Medical Terminology course is a telecourse. We don't have the cable required to watch the videos on so I check discs out of the school library. This poses as a little bit of a challenge since the CD's have 4 episodes on each, you can only have the discs for one week, and you can only check them out once during a school year. The other problem with this is that the class is taught in order of the book (chapters 1-6 and 7-12) and the episodes on the discs are 1-4, 5-8, etc. but the chapters and episodes do not run in the same order. For instance, I am on chapter 4 which goes with episode 8; so I've had to spend time watching episodes I'm not ready for and am trying to catch up on the reading.
The Anatomy and Physiology has been challenging in other ways. It is a hybrid class so I only have to go to campus on Fridays and the rest is online. This means that class time is mostly devoted to labs and not much lecture. If we have questions after reading and looking at the information on our website we post questions to the class forum. So far the teacher and I have been the only ones on the forum; I expected to be the only one in class to take our exam today, but I wasn't.
The first class day in A & P we dissected rats; these were real live, dead rats not rubber or plastic. (No we didn't have to kill them ourselves.) It was unnerving, but very interesting. It turns out that rats look very much like humans on the inside, just smaller. When we were done our poor little specimens were hollow as we pulled all their organs out one by one.
Today was our first exam, at 8:00 am sharp. It was a practical exam with 25 stations set up around the room. We each went to a station; had 90 seconds to look in microscopes, examine a body part model, and answer two questions. I thought it was pretty hard and was unsure about a handful of my answers, but I must have done a good job studying because I earned 100%. Yippee!
After the exam we had more lab time with bones and skin models. There were a couple of bones that had been soaked in vinegar for a week; you would have thought it was rubber. At the end of class I checked out a bag of bones to bring home. So I have almost half a human skeleton to lay out and examine for the next week (these are plastic bones, they don't let us check out the real ones, we can only study those at school. It turns out that real bones are more expensive than plastic bones, they get brittle over time, and students' dogs seem to like them.) Next week I'll be bringing home a skull. I can't wait for Rocky to come home from hunting tonight, I'm going to have the bones laid out on the bar before he gets here.
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