At last we begin teaching medicine tomorrow. The students have arrived (mostly), they know who we are and where to go to get taught. They have hopefully been enthused and bouyed by the inspirational speeches from the directors of the project and they’re ready for the deluge of information they’re about to receive. We’ll try and start slowly and gently, and they (you?) will soon slip into the way of things. The course will at least be incredibly interesting for most of the time. The students have a wide range of backgrounds and ages, so some will slip into it all more readily than others.
Tomorrow I am teaching a little terminology of anatomy, so I’ll work into it an introduction to terms for regions of the body – useful for describing where things are (pain, for example) in a clinical setting. I should be able to whitter on for half an hour or so about abdominal contents with a little Greek and Latin thrown in. This will be the first time we will have tried teaching in small groups in the anatomy labs, although we have tested the labs for large group teaching already. It’ll be a good indicator of how this style of teaching will work for the rest of the year, and, thus, for the anatomy teaching for the course as a whole.
