Friday, May 25, 2007

I teach medical students

Or at least I did. The contrast was interesting: I could hear the students in the day classes learning to count to 30; I was teaching them that if you knew the concentration of the drug in the IV bag (in g/mL), and the prescription was for so-many mcg/kg/min, and the microtubing provides 60 gtt/mL, and you knew what the patient weighed in kg (and you had better know the conversion for mcg to g), then you could arrange to multiply those numbers in such a way that all the units canceled except for the ones you wanted (gtt/min for a drip rate).

Still, the students were pretty good; they worked hard, for the most part. I think they would have liked me to not emphasize thinking so much over memorizing formulas, but oh well. And those who stuck it out all got through, even with the crazy medical grading scheme (where 75% is not a success).

The textbook we have was extremely basic, which is why I decided to use a bunch of other books instead. It certainly made the class more useful.

1 comment:

ralphy said...

Tabby, I think I do like the fact that 75% is not passing in medical classes. I would worry if the medical students were only correct 75% of the time, meaning that 25% of the time they are vulnerable to malpractice suits. Of course, with our health care system, that might be an improvement. Never mind. -- ralphygirl