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After marking my assignments, I keep on coming across a turn of phrase that I know is wrong, but I that I can't figure out/justify why it is wrong. Students keep on referring to "the provision of patient cares" and everytime I read it, I can feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Isn't it "the provision of patient care" ... singular? Can anyone help??
I'll have to find out where it is coming from and beat the offender/instigator of this heinous crime to death when I locate them.
I'm sure I grumble about this every time that I do marking, but I find it fairly soul destroying to have to plow my way through marking assignments to find that students again just don't seem to get it. This is despite having a workshop that pretty much wrote their assignment for them. My honours thesis supervisor - John Lee - and I used to muse that if we gave the answers to the exams/assignments to students that the smart ones would still do well, the average ones would still be average, and the stupid ones ... well, say no more. And then by extension, I think about whether anything that we do/teach/try to explain will make a lick of difference to the students' learning. Man I'm happy today aren't I?
I think I'll eat a cupcake.
Bastardising the verse of one short achillied, large breasted country singer, it would appear that the work goes on forever. I'm in the middle of 2 rotations of clinical placement for my 480 students, 2/3rds go out in "part A" and the remaining 1/3rd who go out in "part B of rotation 1. Now the intervening 3 weeks before the "part A" guys go out on rotation 2 and the process of seeing all facilitators at the hospitals begins again. In between these two rotations are two main classes ... 1) the workshops (this week just gone thank god) and two weeks of "high fidelity simulation". Fun but fairly exhausting.
This week has seen me run 22 classes (I only took 4 of them personally, but it felt like I had taken all of them) of anxiety ridden final year nursing students and trying to guide them through a self reflective process of what they do well and not so well in their practice, and developing up some achievable goals to implement while on their next placement.
Two of the four classes that I took ran really well, the other two ... if I'm honest were a bit of a dog's breakfast and if I'm using more PC phrasing, would have benefited from a little more structure. As has been pointed out to me by my colleague and friend Janice, the timing of said classes (i.e. when they fall throughout the day) is actually really important. The two excellent classes ran from either 0900-1200hrs, or 0800-1100hrs, crappy ones from 1300-1600hrs. Is there something in this?? You bet your sweet country singing life there is.
For those of you who know me well, I'm definitely a morning person. When I was writing my honours thesis, I'd often wake up at 0200 or 0300hrs and do a few hours work before starting an early shift in the hospital. This worked really well for me, because regardless of what time I woke up in the morning, come 2100hrs at night the sleepy dust had embedded itself in the corners of my eyes and not even Hercules could have kept me from hitting the hay. Nothing has really changed and I tire easily in the evening, but am firing on all cylinders come the wee hours of the morning. Unfortunately my afternoon students this time around copped the brunt of my diurnal tendancies and where the ideas and connection points flowed easily in the morning, they were less than fluid come the afternoon "shift".
What does this mean I hear you ask? Well, given that I am the CP5 coordinator and have the power to allocate whomever I want to whichever class I choose, I think I'll only put myself on morning classes (ah to wield the broadsword of power!). When staffing this time around, I was doing a whole load of backfilling as people kept on pulling out at the last minute and I had to keep shuffling people around. Next semester, I'm going to stand firm and keep the morning classes all to myself. So maybe not all of them, but definitely the ones that suit me. I am the coordinator, right? I hope this will make me not quite so tired as well. That I can get the admin stuff done in the afternoon when I don't need my brain to be so much in gear and hit 'em with my best when I'm more awake. I'll try it and see anyway.
I hope all is well in your spheres of influence! All my love to everyone.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpKAA2VxWY8 just in case you needed a Dolly fix)
