Coming into this class, I had heard it was going to be a lot of work and was certainly not going to be a walk in the park. With that said, I had significant interest in Anatomy and Physiology, mostly because I have never had the chance to take a class on this subject material. Thus, going into it I know I was driven to work hard and I would enjoy putting effort into it to take on the challenge of learning so much anatomy and physiology in the four-week period. I have to say the first week of this class was certainly the hardest of all the four weeks, and definitely scared me a little. Yet, I know that in that first week I probably had my time of greatest learning as far as how to study the material most efficiently while still maintaining healthy life habits, which is one of the main goals of Dr. Klepach’s in this class. With 3 quizzes that week and a lab exam on tissue, bones, and muscles, it was nowhere near an easy first week. However, making it through that first week was incredibly rewarding.
In addition, during that first week of class we actually ended up trying a flipped lecture. This meant we would watch recorded lectures from last year and then go into class and do review, answer practice questions, and activities for engraining the material in our head and helping us to understand it better. I had never done a class like this before, so it was very interesting to experience. However, the next week the class vetoed to have normal lectures.
Overall, I think that the lab tests were definitely the most stressful part of this class. For the first one, I truly believe I did not understand the amount of time you had to put into studying the anatomy nor had I yet realized what studying method was going to work best for me. For that first lab exam, I really only looked over the PowerPoints for a decent amount of time. I soon learned that was not going to cut it for studying for the exams, in which you walk around the room and identify not just major muscles on the models, but rather the small muscle that goes around the top of your eye or the specific name of a vertebra, for example. It is not meant to be easy. Needless to say, that first lab exam did not go very well for me at all. However, for the second exam I realized it may help to interact with the models, since after all, that’s exactly what we were going to have to recognize anatomical features on for the exam. Although I still did not do incredibly well on the exam, I made a clear improvement in my grade from the first exam, which was definitely an accomplishment as well as what Dr. K hopes students to do during his Janplan class; find what studying tactics work best for your and improve over the course of the month.
