Anatomy @ my local community college

For the last 16 weeks I have been studying anatomy at my local community college. My lecture teacher has a masters degree in physiology, and seems to "know her stuff" when it comes to the human body. She also works as a physical trainer on the side. She is not the best in terms of organization, or conveying information in a meaningful way, but with a subject like anatomy, I feel like it is really mostly the student's responsibility to jump in there and get to learning. We have an audio tutorial lab that we use. That means we go into this lab space, (there is a punch clock to time stamp our lab notebooks, which tracks how long we spend in the lab), and listen to another professor talking about whichever body system we are learning about for the week for 20 minutes or so. There are also photographs to look at on the computer, and a bunch of plastic models arranged on counters around the room. With a few exceptions we haven't looked at any real human tissue during the class. In the first lab part of the activity was to take a swab of cheek cells and look at them under a microscope. And there were some real (rather than plastic) skulls during the bone lab. But just about everything else has been a plastic model with color-coded parts. I guess it makes it easier to learn at first. Right now in the class I have an 89.5%. I feel like I should be doing better than that, given that I already have a bachelor's degree in biology. I'm hoping to bump that up to a solid A with the remaining lab exam and final.

It is a little odd, I guess, being *this* kind of student again. Before I moved back home and started this nursing track approach, I was a graduate student in marine science. I had finished my master's degree and was beginning work on a PhD. I'll write more about this later. But my day-to-day life as a graduate student at that point was very little coursework. It mostly involved doing research, writing, occasionally being a teaching assistant for an undergraduate course. So to be back in a 200 level course again, taking quizzes, memorizing structures, etc feels just very different.

Most of the other students in my class are women, and most of them are also pre-nursing. There are a few token males, and some students that are planning on trying to get into physician assistant school or other medical tracks. The age range, just by my own visual assessment, is anywhere from 18 years old up to 50-something. One woman in my class is just trying to get her LVN (licensed vocational nurse) degree so that once her kids are out of the house she can become a traveling nurse. Many are working full time and anatomy is the only class they are taking, although my carpool buddy, one of the younger crowd, is a full time student.

The nursing program and pre-nursing courses are very difficult to get into. I am driving about 40 minutes once a week to attend anatomy class at a satellite campus because none of the local ones were adding anyone. Up until a couple years ago, by my understanding, the actual nursing program was selecting students completely based on a lottery system. More recently they have transitioned to a merit-based selection criteria. If you already have some sort of degree, you get points, if you speak a foreign language, you get points, there are various point values depending on your pre-nursing science GPA, and how you do on the TEAS (test of essential academic skills) exam, whether or not you have recent experience in the health professions. I think I have a pretty good chance of getting in. I have been trying very hard to get a job in the health professions to help boost my admissions score.

If you readers have any thoughts on anatomy classes, what your experiences were/are like, leave a comment!