If your dental school is anything like mine, you will or are suffering from the same deluge of paperwork, more paperwork, complicated financial situations, patients canceling or not showing up, even more paperwork and a ton of requirements to fulfill every third week of the semester. If you're anything like me, this has caused you extreme frustration, ajita, sleepless nights, feelings of failure and incompetance and perverse joy that you're not in this alone when you see a classmate running past you with wild eyes and an armful of charts. Quite literally, third year has made me sick since the day I showed up in the clinic, naively thinking that it was going to be fun and more fulfilling to not be in lecture all the time
It is for this reason that I have not posted anything for months. I have literally been scrabbling to stay on top of my paperwork so I will someday be confident that I can graduate on time. Every time I see something aberrant on a radiograph or in my patient, my stomach sinks because I know that it is probably not something that I can do. Crowns and class II restorations are turfed to fourth years for graduation. A patient with two crowns and porcelain veneers that I put in her treatment plan was transferred to a fourth year. My patient today has some cavities but his crown will take priority, so that's another operative procedure I won't get to do right away. The list goes on and on.
A note to all of my readers: when you don't show up to your health care appointment or when you cancel for any reason, you are taking money away from the dentist or doctor, or in my case, taking time away from me. I could have used that chair to see another patient to do a procedure on. It's not just about fulfilling a certain number of requirements, it's about basic experience that I won't get if I can't do it on a patient, and therefore I am not as good a student as I could be. There is no amount of reading or watching videos or lecturing that could replace a good clinical experience. I won't deny my responsibility in staying on top of paperwork or patient scheduling, but I can only do so much.
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
How to Suck at Teaching a Lecture
There are few things worse in a first world, graduate educational system than sitting through 8 hours of boring lecture. Let me tell you. I die a little inside when block lectures appear on my schedule.
For all you educators and future teachers of America, pay very close attention to your pal Brushing Fiend as I describe a few ways to suck at teaching.
1. Don't care. Seriously, just show up at the room a few minutes late - 10-15 minutes, preferably, and launch into your uninspired, boring powerpoint slides without any introduction, greeting or warning at all. Also, when students ask questions, either ignore them or give terse, one-word answers. You know we would rather be pulling our own teeth than listen to you consistently murder any inkling of interest in your topic. Why not just use someone else's slides from 1993 (making your own powerpoint presentation is such a drag) and talk about your own research which is usually a major tangent on the topic?
Speaking of research...
2. Cover every slide with graphs, percentages, citations of journal articles and spend the entire lecture talking about your incredible skills at literature searches, and what the science has to say about your topic. Who cares if the students understand? It's the SCIENCE and it is golden and untouchable.
3. Wanna know what would make this even better? If you read each. And. Every. Word. On. The Slide. Never mind that your audience is a group of presumably intelligent individuals who can read, just to be on the safe side - make sure that every piece of information is read aloud. And then never tell us about the clinical relevance. After all, it's not like we're in a school where application of knowledge is important at all.
4. Ignore the students. Just show up, read the words off the screen, repeat the concepts 12 million times, never engage the audience, never assess their understanding, never reinforce concepts from prior lectures because really, no one else's topic is quite as important as your own. And if the dental students can't be bothered to pay attention (they're really on facebook and gchat, not avidly writing down every word you say), then too bad, you did what was asked of you and now you can collect your salary and go home.
5. Provide a powerpoint presentation loaded with 180 slides, with a crazy colored font and background, all of the literature on one slide, lots of citations and nary a slide with clinical relevance to be seen. So when my classmates and I have a simple conceptual question, we turn to wikipedia instead of the lecture notes because at least wikipedia is easy to understand. That was your intention, right?
6. Have no enthusiasm for your subject, teaching or life in general. [This belongs as a subset of #1 but remember, bullets kill and I have no wish to kill my readers. Unlike some of my professors. Oh, was that a tangent? Should I cite it?] Always remember that students are fragile, tired, multitasking little buggers and if it's not bright and shiny, chances are you'll lose them. The very best way to make sure that students DO NOT pay attention is to speak in a monotone and provide as little excitement as possible.
You know what? Just watch this excellent little clip from "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and model your educational style after the economic teacher. Only don't solicit as much participation - remember, student participation prolongs your lecture and kills puppies. Enjoy.
(Note to dental school instructors: If you really don't want to teach, please don't. It hurts us and wastes our time.)
For all you educators and future teachers of America, pay very close attention to your pal Brushing Fiend as I describe a few ways to suck at teaching.
1. Don't care. Seriously, just show up at the room a few minutes late - 10-15 minutes, preferably, and launch into your uninspired, boring powerpoint slides without any introduction, greeting or warning at all. Also, when students ask questions, either ignore them or give terse, one-word answers. You know we would rather be pulling our own teeth than listen to you consistently murder any inkling of interest in your topic. Why not just use someone else's slides from 1993 (making your own powerpoint presentation is such a drag) and talk about your own research which is usually a major tangent on the topic?
Speaking of research...
2. Cover every slide with graphs, percentages, citations of journal articles and spend the entire lecture talking about your incredible skills at literature searches, and what the science has to say about your topic. Who cares if the students understand? It's the SCIENCE and it is golden and untouchable.
- Also, cram as much as you can on the slides, and use bullet points!!!
- Students love it when you use bullet points!
- They love it even more when you use bullet points and provide no context behind the points, or make each sentence a bullet point!
- Bullets kill.
3. Wanna know what would make this even better? If you read each. And. Every. Word. On. The Slide. Never mind that your audience is a group of presumably intelligent individuals who can read, just to be on the safe side - make sure that every piece of information is read aloud. And then never tell us about the clinical relevance. After all, it's not like we're in a school where application of knowledge is important at all.
4. Ignore the students. Just show up, read the words off the screen, repeat the concepts 12 million times, never engage the audience, never assess their understanding, never reinforce concepts from prior lectures because really, no one else's topic is quite as important as your own. And if the dental students can't be bothered to pay attention (they're really on facebook and gchat, not avidly writing down every word you say), then too bad, you did what was asked of you and now you can collect your salary and go home.
5. Provide a powerpoint presentation loaded with 180 slides, with a crazy colored font and background, all of the literature on one slide, lots of citations and nary a slide with clinical relevance to be seen. So when my classmates and I have a simple conceptual question, we turn to wikipedia instead of the lecture notes because at least wikipedia is easy to understand. That was your intention, right?
 | ||
| Feel free to model your slides after this. |
6. Have no enthusiasm for your subject, teaching or life in general. [This belongs as a subset of #1 but remember, bullets kill and I have no wish to kill my readers. Unlike some of my professors. Oh, was that a tangent? Should I cite it?] Always remember that students are fragile, tired, multitasking little buggers and if it's not bright and shiny, chances are you'll lose them. The very best way to make sure that students DO NOT pay attention is to speak in a monotone and provide as little excitement as possible.
You know what? Just watch this excellent little clip from "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and model your educational style after the economic teacher. Only don't solicit as much participation - remember, student participation prolongs your lecture and kills puppies. Enjoy.
(Note to dental school instructors: If you really don't want to teach, please don't. It hurts us and wastes our time.)
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