Now to education.

I tutor Visceral Anatomy 3007 at the University of Sydney.
It is what seems a rather cushy job, at $130 for 3 hours of work. It's $80/h tutoring rate for 1 hour, then $25/h for 2 hours demonstrating rates.
However, although it seems very nice, it is quite a lot of hard work. Not just only mentally because you have to be kept on the ball with the variety of questions by groups that are working at different rates on different aspects of the same guidelines. There is a lot of repetition also, but it is very taxing physically. When you are talking practically straight for 3 hours and on your feet, you get very drained at the end of it.

But, the educational process is also very different to normal classroom settings, because it is abstract knowledge of anatomy that must be displayed and placed into practice.

I fully admit that I do not know all of my anatomy well enough to teach Visceral very well. But where I excel at is the art and techniques of dissection. Where as Laura, knows her anatomy back to front, she's not good at dissection, so the two of us teaching forms a very good combination, as I often refer students to Robin or Laura for their questions, why Laura asks me to help out groups who have difficult bodies to work with.

Especially yesterday. They were working in the middle mediastinum. The space essentially where your heart lies. Chest wall/ribs and the space between the heart and the wall is the anterior mediastinum, the heart and lungs are middle, and the decending arch of the aorta, trachea, oesophagus and spine is the posterior mediastinum. There was several objectives that they were attempting to complete during their session, mainly concentrating on the heart, blood vessels, and some of the nervous system, mainly phrenic nerves, vagus nerves, and the sympathetic trunk. Some groups did fantastically, others struggled to do what they had to do. One group was completely pathetic and useless, and you could so see that they did not want to do dissection. Unfortunately, they have no choice, as dissection plays 20% marks in attendance alone without the assesment from dissection and other aspects of their pratical exam.

Things I have learnt from dissection.

* Students do not read notes
* Students immediately forget something you say to them the instant you leave their table
* Students have no confidence once they forget what they are supposed to do
* Students still have no confidence if you explain what they have to do, but do not tell them what to do (if you can understand the difference)
* Students do not do work unless you motivate them through "threats".

When I say threat, I don't mean "I'm going to kneecap you with 7lbs of pressure on a crowbar", but instead more like "The department has been inspected closely regarding the quality of work on the cadavers. I would like the highest quality of work because if we are inspected today, then we will lose the body program, and you will fail the course"......

Now, this is general observations, because there are several groups of students who are very eager, and work very well, so much so that they were like me, and need to be kicked out of the dissection room because they still want to keep working.

But even so, I still love teaching. It's lots of fun and is very rewarding when they learn and understand something by the end of the day.

Example, last night, Cathy.
We were back at Kirsten's place, and we were talking about Quality Control/Assurance workers who get to take stuff home due to it being quality tested and thus can not be sold even if it passes testing. Then we got onto talking about hardness of icecream and the relation to ice particles, and then to theories of freezing. (Hardness of icecream, QA at icecream factories have to look for taste, smell, colour, texture and hardness of product).
Now, if I said, if you freeze normallu water, ice particles will expand?
People mostly say, yes, it does.
Now, then if I said, if you freeze water quickly, ice particles will shrink?
Most people will go "Huh?"
This is a bit of thermodynamics that I don't fully understand or claim to understand, but I know that it happens and I have seen it's effects during my Masters with the EMU.
Now, I tried to explain it scientifically to Cathy (who is a visual arts and art theory and history person) and it didn't really sink in.
So I had to change it to a metaphor.

Imagine a pool table with a racked set of pool balls. They are nicely compacted in a group.
Those balls represent water molecules.
Add the cue ball to the table. Imagine the cue ball is temperature change.
Now, normal freezing temperature.
The cue ball is hit lightly into the racked balls. This indicates slow cooling temperature change. What happens? The pool balls break their triangle formation, but stay close to each other, and freeze. Thus expansion of frozen water.
Now, quick freezing temperature.
The cue ball is smacked powerfully into the racked balls. This indicates a quick speed of cooling temperature. What happens? The pool balls break their formation as well, but this time, they scatter all across the table, and freeze. Thus, you have small particles of frozen water!

The total volume stays the same in theory, but the particles are smaller. However, in reality, because of the bonding of water, ice frozen quickly shrinks because there aren't other particles next to it to bond to, and the ice formation "shrinks" to it's own individual molecule, where as normal ice "stretches" between molecules to form the expansion form.

Make sense?
And when I explained that to Cathy, and she went "Oooohh! I get it now", that feeling you get is what teaching is all about. =)