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Showing posts from January, 2014

Some words on team-based learning

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So, one of my classes last semester and three of my classes this semester decided to use, in some way, shape or form, a new-ish way of teaching known as team based learning. For anyone who doesn't know what that is yet, you pretty much get assigned or choose a team of people in your class and complete many activities as a team, including some quizzes and problems and what not. Every so often you have a quiz first that tests your own preparedness for the class and then take the same quiz again but now with your team or group. Then you do other stuff with your team and write up a contract on who does what and what rules you're going to abide by. This, friends, is why the only class I will thoroughly enjoy this semester is Chinese 102, because it is the only class in which none of this nonsense happens. Okay, I exaggerate, I don't actually think it's nonsense. Working in groups is actually a helpful tool in trying to solve problems and help each other to learn and tea

When real life hits

I came upon the realization that everything that I am in the process of learning in my years of college are things that will be directly applicable to my career. This is pretty obvious, but like in high school, how we learn stuff only to prepare us for college and relearn it all over again. Tell me that didn't happen with bio and physics and you'd be lying. We come to college and it didn't matter if we forgot all of it, because it was just going to be retaught. I'm in Neuro201 right now and we're going into more detail than we ever did in 101, but the course still started off "this is a neuron." Yes this makes sense. But what I mean is, there will come a point when our classes will require us to have a large basis of knowledge to understand what is going on or otherwise be completely lost. Not that this isn't already starting to happen, but in med school I'm sure it'll be like, cool so you know about the body so let's talk about hypergloss