Hit with the Knowledge Train

Last week we started our course on immunology, bacteriology, mycology, virology, and parasitology. Here's a sampling:

Major histocompatibility complex, mannose-binding lectin, C3 convertase, cathelicidins, bactericidal permability increasing protein, clonal expansion, transmigration, extravasation, diapedesis, intracellular adhesion molecules, sialyl-Lewis moiety, polymorphonuclear cells, interleukin, interferon, NF-kappa-B, Toll-like receptors, Nod-like receptors, RIG-1 -like receptors, pentraxins, collectins, rationally attenuated pathogens, multivalent vaccines, variolation, anamnestic response.

Teichoic acid, peptidoglycan, lipopolysaccharide, Mannheimia haemolytica, Pasteurella multocida, Haemophilus, Histophilus, progressive atrophic rhinitis, shipping fever, infectious coryza, Streptococcus, Rhodococcus, Bordetella, strangles.

Macroconidia, blastoconidia, basidiomycetes, Aspergillus, Cryptococcus, Blastomyces, Dermatophytoses.

Virion, capside, peplomer, serotype, Herpesvirus, Parvovirus, dimer duplex DNA, psuedorabies, malignant catarrhal fever of cattle, latency, patency, vertical transmission.

Culex anopheles, Lutzomyia, Leishmania, Bartonella bacilliformis, Stomaxys calcitrans, Haematobia irritans, Glossina morsitans, Melophagus, Hippobosca, Lipotena cervi, Wohlfahrtia vigil, Calliphora, Lucilia cuprina, Cochliomyia hominivorax, Gasterophilus, Cuterebra, Anoplura, Mallophagus, Linognathus, Siphonaptera, Felicola subrostratus, Heterodoxus spinager, Panstrongylus.

Don't forget Poisonous Plants: Zea, Avena, Saponaria, Quercus, Acer, Prunus, Malus, Veratrum, Equisetum, Podophyllum, Toxicodendron.

I think there may be flashcards in my future...

Learning styles

As I've mentioned before, physiology is a flowchart-heavy subject, which I love, because drawing a picture of something helps me remember it. That I prefer to think and learn visually has never been more apparent than in this course. When I sit down to read Duke's Physiology of Domestic Animals, my textbook of choice, I find my eyes jumping immediately to the diagrams and images whenever I turn the page. Interestingly, Duke's is has neither the prettiest nor the most figures and tables. There's not a single color image in the whole text, and rarely do the diagrams take up more than half a page. Boron & Boulpaep's Medical Physiology is chock full of full-color, full-page diagrams, but they are often so complex that they cannot stand alone; sometimes, the caption isn't even enough, and to get anything from the graphic, you have to jump back and forth between the text and the graphic it references. If you get lucky, the graphic is on the same page as its reference! The graphics in Duke's, rudimentary as they may be, are the embodiment of the old proverb, "A picture is worth a thousand words."

When we're going over a case in tutor group, my contributions to the conversation are often accompanied by gestures I don't even realize I'm making until I catch a glimpse of my groupmates' amused faces. I often cannot articulate an idea or a concept until I am at the whiteboard, drawing a picture of it. At the very least, my statements do not make any sense without the image in my head I'm using to make them. One of my other group members is as strong a verbal learner as I am visual–she was  answering a question I had asked, and her answer was well-phrased and articulate, and, as I said to her, I understood all of her words, but I just couldn't picture what she meant. I asked her to draw it and explain it again, and of course, it was plain as day. I like having both of us in the group, because with all the translating back and forth between pictures and words, I think it makes the whole group's experience that much richer.

Although I do believe my preferred learning style is visual, I've come to realize only recently (as in, less than 24 hours ago) that deep, global comprehension comes more from the translation between formats than from re-creating something in the same format. I need to read about a topic, transform what I've read into a flow chart, graph, or other diagram, and then write a narrative in my own words, explaining what I've drawn. Though I wish I had realized it sooner than the weekend before the final, I'm thrilled with my new understanding of myself and how I learn, and I can't wait to apply it from the very beginning of our next course.

Allow me to make a very clunky transition here to another educational concept: failure-based learning. The following excerpt is from an article in the New York Times Magazine titled "Learning by Playing: Video Games in the Classroom."

The language of gamers is, when you begin to decipher it, the language of strivers. People who play video games speak enthusiastically about “leveling up” and are always shooting for the epic win. Getting to the end of even a supposedly simple video game can take 15 or more hours of play time, and it almost always involves failure — lots and lots of failure.

This concept is something that Will Wright, who is best known for designing the Sims game franchise and the 2008 evolution-related game Spore, refers to as “failure-based learning,” in which failure is brief, surmountable, often exciting and therefore not scary. A well-built game is, in essence, a series of short-term feedback loops, delivering assessment in small, frequent doses. This in the end may be both more palatable and also more instructive to someone trying to learn. According to Ntiedo Etuk, the chief executive of Tabula Digita, which designs computer games that are now being used in roughly 1,200 schools around the country, children who persist in playing a game are demonstrating a valuable educational ideal. “They play for five minutes and they lose,” he says. “They play for 10 minutes and they lose. They’ll go back and do it a hundred times. They’ll fail until they win.” He adds: “Failure in an academic environment is depressing. Failure in a video game is pleasant. It’s completely aspirational.”

It is also, says James Paul Gee, antithetical to the governing reality of today’s public schools. “If you think about kids in school — especially in our testing regime — both the teacher and the student think that failure will lead to disaster,” he says. “That’s pretty much a guarantee that you’ll never get to truly deep learning.” Gee and others in the games-and-learning field have suggested that someday, if we choose to channel our resources into developing more and better games for use in classrooms, the games themselves could feasibly replace tests altogether. Students, by virtue of making it through the escalating levels of a game that teaches, say, the principles of quantum physics, will demonstrate their mastery simply by finishing the game. Or, as Gee says: “Think about it: if I make it through every level of Halo, do you really need to give me a test to see if I know everything it takes to get through every level of Halo?”

Hmm. What a fascinating concept! Failure as "...brief, surmountable, often exciting, and therefore not scary..." It's absolutely true. I've played enough video games to know that the desire to try again is never stronger than immediately after failing. Is it the knowledge that the world in which the failure occurs is a virtual one? Is it that, even within the virtual world, there is no limit to the number of times you are "allowed" to fail before finally succeeding? Think about that–if, ultimately, you succeed, you make it to the end of level 1, say, the game does not come back and say, we're sorry, it took you eleventy-seven tries to finish the level, you are not good enough to keep going. It says, you did it! You get to go to level 2! 

I can think of ways to apply that concept  even outside a virtual world. In second grade, part of the math curriculum was the Mad Math Minute. Every Monday was the pre-test, whose score didn't count, and every Friday was the Real Mad Math Minute, whose score did count. We worked through addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division with these Math Minutes. You couldn't go to the next level until you successfully completed the first one. Here's how I would change it: rather than having just one pre-test, have as many as the student needed. Allot 10, or even just 5 minutes every day for students to practice, one minute at a time. If they don't finish the level in one minute, they get to start over, but once that 5 minutes is up, they have to put the "game" down until the next day. While not my area of expertise, I can't imagine designing a computer program to those parameters would be beyond a freshman computer science major.

I love a good upheaval of the conventional wisdom!

Dr. G....veterinary medical examiner?

There's a woman here who is a bit quirky, a bit non-conformist, and a bit intimidating. She's become a legend in her own time. Any student here can easily tell you one or two folktales about the doctor I am now christening Dr. G. (The "real" Dr. G is a medical examiner who has a TV show on Discovery Health. She always gets to the bottom of mysterious deaths.) This quirky, out there vet and professor earned this title last week, after a lecture she gave, in which she, too, got to the bottom of some mysterious deaths. In this case, the victims were pigs who were living in their owner's backyard. Dr. G was called to the farm when the first pig died. It was sent to necropsy, but the results, while inconclusive, hinted to Dr. G that some sort of toxin might be involved. She's the kind of person who would sit down with every book on toxicities and poisonous plants in the library, and her list of symptoms and findings, and go through page by page until she had generated a new list of every possible cause of death. Dr. G is thorough, to say the least. After many sleepless nights, sneaking into the library under her Invisibility Cloak to steal books from the Restricted Section, writing scroll after scroll.....

Dr. G took her list and returned to the backyard, whereupon she asked the owner one question: "Do you shoot clay pigeons?" The owner replied, "No, but when I moved in here, there were piles of shotgun shells out back."

A close inspection of the backyard did, in fact, turn up some shards of old clay pigeons.  The discs' interiors are coated with pitch, which is, apparently, poisonous to pigs when ingested.

Dr. G is also the professor of the Poisonous Plants course, and a small ruminant specialist. She is most often seen dressed in cargo shorts, with her T-shirt tucked in, wearing Birkenstocks or Tevas with socks. Her favorite sport is orienteering. If I had to survive in the wilderness, I would want Dr. G by my side.

There are many more stories about Dr. G (and I'm sure I will acquire new ones) for future sharing.

Herbology

This semester one of my electives is Poisonous Plants. Sounds like Harry Potter, right? Luckily, though poisonous, none of the plants we're learning about have teeth, or the ability to produce ear-splitting screams. The first two sessions of class involved tromping around campus actually looking at plants, which was great, but the rest of the semester is all lecture based. Either way, I enjoy going out in the woods with my dog, and being able to identify some of the plants we see. I like knowing the names of things, whether it's part of a boat that offers no hint as to its location or purpose (like pintle and gudgeon), or constellations, or birds and plants, I like knowing the answer to the question "What's that?". I imagine I started asking that not long after I started talking, and even if I don't verbalize it everytime it pops in my head, it's often on my mind.

Where's the love?

Unlike the majority of my classmates, whose degrees are in animal science, my undergraduate degree is in biology. This leads me to say things like, "I love cells!" and, "I miss biochemistry lab..." or "It really is all about electrons, isn't it?" at which point my classmates roll their eyes and shake their heads.

In my mind, medicine is as much a science as biology or chemistry or physics. In fact, just as history, literature, languages, philosophy, and art can be collectively studied as the humanities, medicine is truly the collective study of biology, chemistry, physics, psychology, and, I would argue, art and language as well.

Our curriculum begins with the study of anatomy, a subject which is somewhat set apart from the rest. It is both a foundation and a culmination. The organism must operate within the boundaries of its anatomy, but, as they say, form follows function. Since returning from spring break, we have embarked upon our study of physiology, the functions that follow said form.

I love physiology. We talked current and resistance, concepts I first encountered in physics, when we were learning cardiovascular physiology. We talked mass action, one of the most important concepts in chemistry, when we were learning acid-base disturbances as well as endocrine physiology. I love making those connections and seeing how what we're learning fits into the larger context of what I have already learned through my biology curriculum, but I often feel like the only person who sees those connections.

Those connections are the whole point. I am not in school to learn to be a doctor. I am in school to acquire (or at least to begin to acquire) the body of knowledge that is medicine, which will allow me to be a doctor.

Defining the "job" of a professor

Interesting conversation on our way to school this morning. Friday means neuroanatomy, and neuroanatomy means 2 hours of lecture followed immediately by 2 hours of lab. Who is the lovely soul who gets to preside over the entire class of first years for 4 consecutive hours? Let's call her Pia Mater. No one would envy her her task...neuroanatomy is a notoriously difficult course, and P. Mater has exactly 28 hours of lecture and lab to build us a foundation that will support our future endeavors in the neurology course and clinical rotation. The conversation this morning stemmed from an interaction, via email, that one of my housemates had with P. Mater. Housemate had emailed P. Mater with a question, which P. Mater had answered with the suggestion to investigate some further sources. Housemate contended that P. Mater was shirking responsibility to reply as she did, and this is what sparked our conversation. Are we, as students paying tuition, customers? Do we employ our professors? I cannot subscribe to this mindset. I believe we pay tuition for the privilege of studying under and learning from the professors employed by a college. Learning is not meant to be passive. It is not the "job" of a professor to ensure her students' success, especially at the graduate and professional level. This gets right back to my belief that as vet students, we are truly students first. To matriculate in this program is to have some love of learning for learning's sake. If you don't enjoy the pursuit, it's going to be a long four years. Learning how to learn is equally important for this career. Not every case fits neatly into the flow charts and dichotomous keys of Ettinger's Veterinary Internal Medicine. Practicing the skills that allow us to dig up information when we're not even quite sure what we're looking for, or where to look for it, is an investment that will pay dividends down the road. This was one of those conversations where my reaction was in the form of a very strong conviction, which, at the time, I had a very hard time articulating.

1200 Vet Students in One City

That's ten percent of all the vet students in North America! 

The University of Wisconsin graciously hosted the 2010 SAVMA Symposium. (That's the Student American Veterinary Medical Association.) It was four days of lectures, wet labs, field trips, athletic and academic competitions, SWAG, and, of course, socializing. I attended a lecture on Large Animal Fluid Management in the Field, a panel discussion with three dairy producers about What Producers Expect from their Veterinarians, went on a field trip to four dairy farms just outside Madison, and explored downtown Madison. 

Next year's symposium is at U.C. Davis!