Structure through chaos

Today we schooled in for the winter semester.
The truth is that I kind of longed for this day for quite some time now. I was curious to see how the tutors were like and, since we haven’t met them all yet, still are. I began the day with anatomy and was looking forward to have a lesson with Dr. Snajdr, a teacher that already introduced himself at the day of introduction. To my surprise, as well as disappointment, another tutor entered the practice room and introduced himself in rather poor English. My guess is that he is a teacher from the Czech branch of our Faculty and is about to have his first international group of students. Good thing anatomy mostly consists of Latin and Greece and is rather easy to understand as well as study on your own.

By his side stood a younger girl, I guess she’s in the last year or so, and she introduced herself in fluent English which kind of balanced my approach to the whole situation.

Later on they both, regardless the poor English which I got used to really quickly, proved their selves to be great teachers!
The lesson was very well structured and I found the time well worth spent and the whole situation just made me really happy.
At first we went through different axis of the body in order to be able to locate and distinguish different parts. Our first parts of the body to get to know were the parts of the upper limb; upper arm, forearm and shoulders. The teacher and his assistant went brought in a big box filled of bones – authentic bones that is. It was a strange feeling to have five different bones obviously from five different individuals – strange but exciting.

I never thought that one single bone could have so many different parts. Just the five bones in the upper limb (the lower is added next week) contains of approximately 50 parts with different names. I need to force them all into my head over the next week – there’s a test on the next Friday continuing as a weekly routine; almost one test every two weeks. I believe that it’s pretty good to have them; I prefer to have something that triggers one to study rather than to sit with it all right before the final exam.
There will be many late evenings under the feeble reading light and a great many visits at the Anatomy study room (aka. “The Graveyard”) where one can borrow bones to practice at.

The day went on with both Histology and Cytology lectures as well as Biophysics lectures, both of them rather long and boring. Tonight I’ve been going over the upper bones of the limb, trying to sort out all the nomenclature and terminology.

It is tough – but far from impossible...