Monday, June 15, 2009

The Monday That Was

It was a busy day, ordered and chaotic.

I had a massage this morning. Before the massage, Leah usually asks what I've come in for. The last three weeks, I've had these awful headaches and have been tense and anxious, so she's worked on me for those things. This week, I said, I need ENERGY. I'm tired of feeling like a slug crawling around the garden. I want to be more like Peter Rabbit, the famous cabbage filcher. (Am I remembering right? Peter Rabbit was the one who stole the cabbage from ol' Mr. What's-His-Face's garden, right? Mr. McGregor?) Anyway, give me some of what he had. So Leah did.

She put a couple of acupuncture needles in a certain spot my leg. (She's got her license and supplies so she's soon to be doing both acupuncture and massage in her little office.) And she started the massage, which turned out great. I really did feel energized by the whole thing.

After, though, there was my niece and tutoring.

Ahhhh....energy...draining....away....

We studied together for about five hours and after, I felt like I was a little deflated helium balloon. Very flaccid.

"Flaccid" is a word that my niece didn't recognize, by the way. Also, she has trouble with the word "rigid." She pronounces it with a hard g.

Also? What is up with teachers providing copies of Power Point slides for their lectures? Is that not the most useless thing in the world? Acres and acres of trees gone so that people who would routinely fail the test for relevant Power Point presentations can make hundred and hundreds of handouts per semester of their crappy slides, usually copies of textbook illustrations and the like? Seriously. My niece had probably twenty pages worth of handouts like that and more than half of the pages--maybe three quarters--were of slides of illustrations from the book that my niece also has. Only, the copies of the slides are about two inches square, so you can't see any godddamn detail anyway. You still have to go and look at the book. What the hell is wrong that teachers can't point students to the illustration in the book?

Sigh.

My early biology instructors thankfully didn't use Power Point in their lectures. They used to DRAW ON THE GODDAMN CHALKBOARD. That meant that, in order to take notes, you too had to DRAW IN YOUR NOTES. It took them time to draw it, and you took the time to draw it and take notes besides.

And here's the thing: You actually have to understand what in the hell you are doing when you draw something. Seriously. I mean, have you ever tried to draw anything? You have to look at it. Really look at something when you draw it. It takes concentration and understanding of the subject, doesn't it? But if the teacher just hands you a copy of the drawing--not even a drawing they did, but one that they scanned into the computer--and says, "Oh, you'll need to know this," not only do I suspect that he or she doesn't really know it in all that much detail, but you? You're not going to learn a goddamn thing from that. Not as a beginning biology student, you aren't.

So that's my rant about lecturers who use Power Point for basic level classes and who hand out the notes besides.

But I am a little bit prejudiced. I'm not of the TV generation when it comes to learning. I'm not, I mean, a visual learner. My hands are really the part of me that learns deeply. I can and often do turn off my brain and let my hands learn first. Then my hands teach it to The Brain. Then I know it. I mean, if I see something, I can appreciate it, sure. But if my hands do something, then I know it.

It's the difference between reading a recipe for baking bread--and actually baking bread. It's deal or no deal.

Don't just ask me to just look at the parts of the cell, ask me to draw them in my notes. I love the parts of the cell because I was asked to draw them in my notes. I don't like the parts of the immune system, because I had a teacher who never asked me to draw them. (Oh, I could have done it on my own, but I'm LAZY. And I didn't want to take immunology in the first place.) Funnily enough, my immunology prof did used to draw out the experiments on the board and I used to have to copy them into my notes and, as a result, I know the experiments that tested many of the basic hypotheses behind our understanding of the immune system.

So there.

Ahhh....ignore me. It's late (almost one-thirty in the morning) and I just feel ranty about learning and teaching.

I'll just say thank you to my biology teachers who were so old-school that the most high tech thing they did was put chalk to chalkboard.

After hours of studying, I was tired and I didn't feel like cooking dinner so Dave and I went out and had a feast at a local Indian restaurant. We had a huge appetizer of mixed pakoras and samosas and pappadum with different chutneys. Then we shared dal makhani and aloo gobi and basmati rice. We also ordered raita (because we made the mistake of ordering the dal and the aloo gobi hot and it was so spicy that my tongue almost stopped talking to me) and garlic naan. We were too stuffed to even attempt dessert, but Dave brought home a Kashmiri naan for himself for later.

I came home and just collapsed. I seriously took a pre-bed nap. Of course, it's now after one-thirty in the morning and I'm still awake, but I'm tired now at least.

I have another therapy appointment in the morning. Ahhh...I haven't done any of my "homework" for it either. And, sadly, it's not the kind of thing you can cram for, life.

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