Cold

Well dear readers, I haven't much to say. It has been a cold week here in St Louis. Today the low was 9, yesterday the low was 8. Fortunately, our heat has been working so our little hut stays nice and warm. Mindy and I went ice skating at Forest Park at an outdoor rink there. It was quite a nice evening. We've resolved to do more dates this year and skating was a nice start. Several hundred other people must have had the same idea however, since the rink was quite crowded. Also in keeping with new year's, I have been running three times a week with Mindy in Tower Grove Park. It's really nice to get that sympathetic stimulation in the morning to jump start my day. I still study all day long, but at least I don't feel like I'm getting more and more sluggish as they weeks progress.

We had ward conference today, which was meant to be an abbreviated block so we could "have the final session in our homes." What that meant however, was that I was at church for 5 hours instead of the usual 3. We had trainings for the Elder's Quorum and a Ward Council to attend. Sacrament meeting was pretty good, with the exception of being 2 hours long. There were several people called up from the audience to speak, but some of the talks felt like they were just there to take up time.

School is school, by which I mean that it's still like drinking from a firehose. I feel like I finally have a handle on the stuff that was presented at the end of the first week, leaving me all of last week's material to master. Immuno is pretty interesting. Genetics is ok. THe one downside is PBL sessions which we are obligated to attend.

For the uninitated, PBL stands for Problem Based Learning, and is a curricular element that, while all the rage at medical schools, is mercifully absent from most of my curriculum. What is supposed to happen in PBL is that a group of 10 students with a faculty moderator review a case weekly. Between sessions the students do lit searches on various subjects and report back the next week. At the next session we all share our information and the next portion of the case is revealed. THe theory is that we are supposed to learn to present things, do lit searches, and of course learn about the material in question.

Some of these things actually happen in reality. We do in fact learn how to do lit searches, and we do present things to one another, supposedly mimicking case presentations that happen on the wards. What really happens, however, is that we wind up being "experts" on some trivial minutae and never really learn what our colleagues researched. Sometimes the lit searcehs are incredibly time consuming as well, sapping valuable time from studying genetics or immuno. The PBL sessions are 45% of my grade, which means it behooves me to do a good job, and relieves me of the burden of some exam studying, since each exam is only 18% of my grade then. Fortunately we don't spend as much time in PBL as a lot of the other groups, which means I can study T cell activation even more!

I hear you, though. YOu are thinking, why doesn't Spiff care about collaborating with his colleagues? Doesn't PBL provide the relevance factor that Spiff is always complaining is missing in lecture? Isn't it nice to learn in a different way every now and then? Wouldn't it be much better to have self directed learning all the time, since you're more likely to remember what you find yourself? Spiff will now field these questions.
-RE: collaboration: PBL isn't collaboration. It's lots of separate people contributing to a discontinuous and unorganized whole.
-RE: relevance: PBL doesn't introduce relevance necessarily. Instead we get bogged down in the minutae of say the mechanisms of isochromome 6p formation in retinoblastoma. The potential is there, but relevance is not necessarily associated with PBL
-RE: Different learning modality: See also -time wasting
RE: self directed learning: Yes, it is true that I tend to remember stuff that I research myself. BUT, on a per unit time, PBL is really inefficient. I talked to our moderator about this in private, and he said that PBL is not designed to be an efficient learning tool in terms of volume. It is more to practice the interpersonal skills. Great. I already know how to give talks and presentations.

It is some consolation that at least my group mates aren't total tools, which is the case in some groups. We have several ground rules which keep things moving briskly too.
-NO powerpoint
-NO presentaion over 3 minutes
-Yes treats every week
-1 page max on any handouts

AT least PBL is only weekly and fortunately it isn't too big of a waste of time.... though we'll see what I say as the term progresses.
-Spiff