Professors: The Little Professor That Could

One of our professors is an adorable, round little bald guy. He's super nice and cares for all his students. What does he teach? Grass.

As a subset of Nutrition, we have a once weekly lecture on agronomy. That's basically learning about grass and pasture. You'd be surprised at how passionate some people can get about grass. The lectures are pretty good, and they're interesting except for the fact that they are about grass.

This guy cares so much for his students. He's willing to spend as much time as anyone needs to teach them about grass, saying that we pay enough to get as much one-on-one time as it takes. We have an assignment to do that involves a lot of work in spreadsheets, and he constructed a fancy template, examples, and even set it up so if we enter data points into the template they will automatically form a graph. Before giving us any problems, he pretends he's a student and does them himself to make sure they're reasonable. Even during lectures, he's always commenting on the body language, and if people look too bored he'll adjust the lecture accordingly. He'll also make sure to give us as much extra readings and resources as any A+ student could ever want. Before our physiology midterm, he cancelled his class, since it was on the same day.

How much friendlier could you get! Once, he responded an email of mine, and then sent a second email saying, "PS, keep smiling!"

He does go a bit overboard. I guess he wasn't very good at math when he was growing up because he goes entirely out of his way to make sure we understand any calculations we may need to do. This would be fair, except for the fact that they are some of the most basic equations you can get. It's not really necessary to explain how to plug in numbers, or describe the equation for a line. However, he's very concerned that we might find it patronizing, and will give a polite explanation of why he feels the need to go into detail about something.

One thing that's pretty funny is he likes to toot his own horn every so often. He'll make some comment like, "Back when I was an undergrad, I wasn't a straight A's honors student because I regurgitated formulas. I learned the concepts behind them."

One time, a slide of his read that a farmer had purchased a "fairy farm" instead of a "dairy farm." I didn't notice at first, but I did hear muffled laughter around the room. Poor guy was just as confused as I was, until finally he changed slides and someone pointed out the mistake. He was pretty embarrassed, but that's a great typo if you ask me.

There's something just really cute about everything he says. I think it's a combination of his concern that everyone understands everything and is interested in what he's teaching, and the fact that he's teaching about grass. He often waffles around with anecdotes, grinning about a study or a discussion about a colleague he wants to tell us about. The other day, he went off on a side story, prefacing it with, "As an aside with a smile..." Adorable!

Now, if he were teaching anatomy or physiology, we'd be all set.

Fuzzy Scalpels

I like scalpels, but they gave my anatomy group quite a bit of trouble when we were first starting out.

I wasn't sure how I would feel about dissection, because my high school wasn't very good so I never had the chance to do any. I thought that I might be really creeped out by the dead dogs, or the overpowering smell of preservatives, but as it turns out it's not that creepy and the smell isn't that strong. I was also surprised at how nice handling a scalpel feels.

Sorry if this sounds creepy, but I love cutting with scalpels. It's so smooth! They're really sharp, so they make very nice, efficient cuts, and there's something satisfying about it, like a job well done.

So where does the trouble come in? Here is a picture that I got off google:

You have your metal handle, and the blade snaps on the top (the oblong thing you see in the middle of the blade is part of the handle). You can also see how where the bottom of the blade matches up with the handle, there's a diagonal line.

For starters, we keep putting the blades on backwards. Every time! The pointy part of the diagonal is always facing the wrong way. That's pretty embarrassing by itself, especially since it's been almost a year now. What makes that worse is that we had a very difficult time getting the blade back off at first.

You see, they had these little boxes that served as both a sharps container and an "easy" way to snap the blade off. You're supposed to stick the scalpel into a slot, twist it a bit, and the blade magically pops off. In theory. The first box we tried was so full, we couldn't even get the blade to go into the slot. The next two boxes we tried... well, the blade didn't magically pop off. Every single one of our lab group of five tried to jam it in and twist it around and finagle the blade off, but no one could get it to work. Eventually, we settled with just using forceps to pry the blade off, and hope it doesn't go flying or snap into pieces. I haven't seen the boxes around in a while, so I guess the faculty also decided they sucked and got rid of them.

Just as an ending note, why did I name the site Fuzzy Scalpel? Well the real reason is that I tried putting vet-related words together until I found two that I liked. But! (Warning, this may be a disturbing image for some) The image that came to mind was how when we cut through the skin of our dissection dogs, which are short haired dogs, the fur sticks all over the scalpel. This wouldn't happen in surgery because you shave and sterilise the operation site beforehand.

Professors: Amino Acids

This year, we have a double-semester course about animal nutrition. At first, there was this cheerful old guy teaching us, but then we started a new topic and, with it, got a new lecturer.

His lectures were endless, life-sucking stretches of white slides with black text. He would agonizingly read out every bullet point, talking very slowly in an American accented drawl. He spent half an hour on a single slide one time. Going to his class really didn't offer much return on the time investment, because in your own time you could easily go over at least three of his lectures in the space of an hour. His slow speech did make me laugh out loud once, when he switched to a new slide and it sounded like a complete statement when he said, "This is another slide."

Unbelievably, he was teaching faster than he expected. Despite giving us enough information for half a lecture (especially if you compare to our other classes, such as fast forward textbook lady), he was well ahead of schedule. We got two classes off because of this.

One day, he had to be out of town, so he had a guest lecturer fill in. I guess he didn't trust that guy to have done a good job, because the next class, he spent a good portion of time going over what the guest lecturer had discussed.

I mentioned that he had an American drawl. However, his accent was a little funny. He pronounced amino acids as "am-eye-no" acids. Wait, what? I have never heard anyone pronounce them like that. "a-mee-no" or "ay-meeno" sure, but "am-eye-no"? He said it so often, it became his defining feature.

Sheep Are Expendable

Our physiology labs are often about studying a system by looking at the effects of drugs or electrical stimulation (like nerves). Some of these labs are pretty cool, but it sounds like they used to be way cooler, and also more terrifying.

Maybe ten years ago, they would bring live sheep into the lab, and divide students up into pairs or groups. The students were given a lab guide, a sheep, an anaesthesia kit, and sent on their merry way to begin the lab. The amazing part is that this meant anaesthetising the sheep, doing surgery to find whatever was necessary, cannulating (sticking a tube into) whatever artery or vein they needed, and then doing the procedure. On a live sheep. These would have been students like me and my classmates. Right now, we have as much anaesthesia experience as you do.

The result of this was sheep dying during the lab due to some miscalculation, or worse, waking up and freaking out. The one group each year that could do it right thought it was great, but you can imagine how stressed out everyone else was. Picture yourself tentatively doing surgery on a sheep, pausing to try and decipher the next step in the lab book, and having your sheep suddenly wake up and start kicking around. It actually took the school a long time to figure out that this whole let's-give-everyone-a-sheep thing wasn't a good idea.

These days, if any lab involves a live animal, we just watch a video of some vet faculty doing it. The videos are pretty old, but I really don't mind not destroying some poor sheep of my own. Some of the labs even use computer simulations.

Not everything is computerised these days, though. Sometimes we get to work with live tissues, which usually come from a rabbit (and sometimes we get to use other vet students as the test subjects). One lab that was pretty cool was when the professor had a rabbit heart, hooked up to an apparatus to keep it alive and beating, and we watched how the beating changed in response to different drugs. It was right there, beating.

Professors: Audio Textbook on Fast Forward

One of our anatomy lecturers is a friendly Indian woman who may have missed the point about what a lecture is supposed to be.

Unfortunately, even if she were the most amazing lecturer ever, she's quite difficult to understand. During one of her lectures last year, it actually took me and my friend a good portion of the lecture to realise that the "eesofaygus" is the esophagus. In another lecture, I discovered that the "vasheena" is the vagina.

Even more unfortunately, she is not the most amazing lecturer ever. I know this is vet school and we learn large quantities of information in any given lecture, but most of the time professors put emphasis on key points. This lady tried to fit the entire textbook chapter on the eye into one 50 minute lecture. There was no reiteration of points, no emphasis, she was just spewing facts and details like a fountain. In order to cram everything in, there was never any halt in the flow of words. Did she breathe during that entire lecture? I'm not sure.

That lecture was pretty much the textbook on audio-book. On fast forward.