The Pain Review

You know, I can't blame SheMaJo -- I just can't. If someone gave an exam as crappy as the pain exam in the course that I coordinate, I guess it'd only make sense to schedule the most inconvenient time available to go over it. In case you didn't notice, she not only made the time of the review at 1 PM on the last day of school before spring break (a time when the majority of the class will be obviously g-g-g-gone), she also managed to make the start-time of the review session coincide with tip-off of the University's biggest sport. Kudos to you SheMaJo: was the Wednesday in the middle of spring break taken? Did you not think of holding it in an undisclosed location that we had to solve a riddle to find?


"If we hold it at a time when no one will attend,
we won't look utterly ridiculous"
So what gives? Are they doing this to avoid the en masse unprofessional discourse (read as: pharmaceutical beatdown) that we give them every time Dr. Dean's questions are the topic of the day?

Surely not.

Her e-mail even tells us that the material that she emphasizes during this section will be hot topics on the final and therefore good-shit-to-know. But it seems that this is next-to-off-limits because it's good-shit-to-know. Keep following me: what about our cases? They were the most useful things to study for the exam because the only way to study for it was to learn to think like Dr. Dean rather than learn about the drugs in question. But could we have those?


"NEVER!"
Hell the fuck no we couldn't have the case studies to prepare for the exam! The reason? Well they want to build a bank of shitty questions, that way they don't have to go through the trouble of writing shitty questions each and every year -- they'll just pick the mangiest puppies in the litter and throw them out there to confuse next years batch of PY2s.

In all seriousness: if they're building a bank with those questions, they should go ahead and throw those out on the basis of how much we told them they 'stank'. And the priority in any educational program needs to be the students learning the goddamn material, not minimizing the work the professor has to do. If something is so instrumental to me learning how to be a pharmacist, I rightfully expect to have it. On the same ideal: if an session is so instrumental to our success it shouldn't be at the most inconvenient time possible. Also, if you teach a grand total of 4 weeks or so in the main course sequence of a program spanning 4 years, it isn't very unreasonable to ask you to write three whole patient cases per year as it's exponentially less than what is expected of any of us.

Most pharmacists have contact with thousands of patients per year - and I'm under the cheery impression that they're all like goddamn snowflakes. What's keeping him from writing three new cases per year? Did they add another par 5 at the country club? Is finding new drugs to shoot up booger-holes getting to be too strenuous? Whatever the reason, it's pretty clear that the success of students is a secondary objective behind the leisure time of the professor.

Awesome: