I am pre med and am also interested in public health especially decreasing health disparities. With these future career goals in mind taking a class such as Anatomy and Physiology could be a beneficial course choice. For the field of medicine Anatomy and Physiology is not a pre-requisite, however once a student matriculates into a medical program he or she will have to take anatomy and physiology to graduate. Thus, taking the course now could be advantageous to my schooling in the future.
A lot of past students warned me earlier that this course was very hard and time consuming, but I was still unsure if I might need it in the future so I decided to give it a chance. The first couple days were rough to say the least. We had three quizzes and a lab exam within the first week. Class was almost four hours long from 9-1pm on most days. We had lecture first and then lab for the first week and then lab first and then lecture after for the last three weeks. We were asked to sleep for 8 hours a night, to eat a balacnced diet and to try to exercise as well as complete the class at an optimal level. Prof. Klepach thought it was very much feasible but by requiring that we follow the lifestyle and do well in school what he was really encouraging was for us to find a way to study more effectively, learn better time management skills, and take our well –being seriously. For the most part I was able to exercise more regularly and eat three balanced meals but I still felt stressed and was not able to get eight hours of sleep every night.
My lack of sleep was probably at first due to the fact that we were operating on a flipped lecture style. In flipped lecture the students and I would watch youtube.com videos of pre-taped lectures and pre-taped lab lectures prior to class. Then the class would be operated with the assumption that we had done our part and had done the pre-work. During class we would complete group exercises including an overview of questions we individually came to class with. Afterwards Prof. Klepach would give us group quizzes and reviews. I found out that I really like flipped lectures. As someone that does not really learn very well by auditory means I was really happy to be provided with the pre-taped lectures because it provided me with the option to play back things that I might not have caught the first time. Moreover, the flipped lecture style allowed me to reinforce what I knew or did not know with the in class group quizzes and daily individual quizzes.
I plan to try to integrate some of the components of flipped lectures into my spring semester. I am already a junior but it seems like there are some study techniques that I have to start implementing on a daily basis. For an example I am going to try to spend more of my evenings prepping for the upcoming class instead of reviewing material that I had previously put off.