I feel a little (only a little) contrary in saying this, but I’m looking forward to teaching on Monday.
Teaching on Monday mornings can be tough, in that you may not have had enough time in the previous week to prepare exactly as you would like, so Sunday afternoons and/or evenings get eaten up by textbooks. Getting your head ready to teach a part of the body that you don’t normally spend much time looking at in any detail as your very first task of the week can be very hard, especially as I can’t take my usual soluble Monday a.m. stimulants (coffee) into the anatomy labs. And we teach for about 3 hours. Add to that the very busy first term of the first year and the huge amount of anatomy that we teach in 14 consecutive weeks that is then followed by the first exam before Christmas, and the current break we get from anatomy teaching in term two becomes very welcome.
Teaching is fun though, and it is always nice to have time to spend preparing, learning, and teaching. It’s a very good exercise for me, and it gives me opportunity to spend time with my textbooks to better understand human anatomy (I warned that I was feeling contrary). My first degree was Anatomical Sciences, and I chose it because I was very interested in the subject. That has never changed, although my interests have become more specialised.
The students are very bright, enjoyable to work with and can be challenging some mornings (which is a good thing, I promise). Those qualities raise my own expectations, as although it will be many years yet before I really have a thorough recall of the major proportion of anatomical knowledge, as a teacher one always tries to appear as though one really does deserve to be standing at the front of the room.
So on to the kidney for next Monday. The kidney? Oh damn, I hate teaching the kidney.
