Teaching

Time flies when you’re busy, and we’ve been busy. I’ve been teaching histology with microscopes we brought, and it’s going well. So far we’ve made it through the cell, epithelia, nerve, and part of muscle tissue. Next week will be connective tissue, and then we’ll have lots of review and lab time before the test. I'm also teaching some anatomy, which will pick up when histology is finished. The students say they don’t mind histology or physiology, but they are definitely struggling with the biochemistry. Hopefully we can help them through these essential subjects.

It’s funny to think that I am now an instructor. Students constantly hound me with questions (which are fun!), ask me about their grades, yell at me for not getting the notes out on time, etc… It’s interesting to be on the other side. You realize you can’t please everyone, but you can do a lot to help the students. Every day we have 2 hour help sessions where the students can ask us any questions they may have. These sessions are great for the students to get questions answered, and they’re also great for us to get to know the students. Most of our classes are lectures due to our time constraints, but we have started tutorial groups and I run the histology lab as well. I try to make my lectures interactive, and it would be nice to have more small-group activities, but minimal faculty and time are the issues; we have a lot of material to cover. The neuroscience class taught by one of my colleagues will be starting weekly team based learning sessions, so we’ll see how those go. One of the hardest parts about teaching here is finding the right speed. We don’t want to go to fast, but we need to cover a certain amount of material. It’s a fine line, and we are constantly adjusting based on student feedback.

It may seem odd that second year students like us are teaching at a medical school. I don’t think I’ve explained this, so I’ll take this opportunity to do so. The medical school here is based on the European system, in which students go straight from high school to Medical school. Here, their first year consists of broad base classes much like the ones we had in undergrad (math, biology, English, etc…). The second year is where the medical curriculum begins, with biochemistry, anatomy, histology, embryology, and physiology. We are teaching the 2nd and 3rd years, and we teach them many of the subjects we learned during our first year of med school and during undergrad.

It’s been great for a few reasons. The material is fresh in our minds, so with minimal studying the night before I’m able to talk about these subjects in good detail. Histology is pretty straight forward anyway; the hardest part is learning to recognize tissue, which comes with time. Also, most of us have degrees in biochemistry, so the biochemistry class is right in our strike zone. We’ve done all the normal physiology, anatomy, and embryology as well, so these topics are well within reason.

The difficulties arise when students ask questions about clinical scenarios. We know on a very basic level how our material fits in to the clinical picture, so these questions we often cannot answer. It has been fun for us to look these things up and It’s definitely a good head start for pathology. Overall, however, we are teaching material that is within our capacity. In fact, I think we might even be better suited to teach some of this material than physicians who have been practicing clinical medicine for a while. Of course, a pathologist would likely do 1000 times the job I’m doing with histology, but the principles of biochemistry I think many physicians like to forget.

So, we’ll continue teaching until our time is up. I can say already that I will miss the students greatly when we leave. They are so great, and we’ve been getting to know them better and better as they become more comfortable with us. This has been an incredible experience so far, and we’re only half way through!

That’s all for now, hopefully I’ll be better at updating in the future.