What’s the Rush?

I have never seen students in such a rush to do math.  Before they have even finished writing the number used for a calculation they are punching the calculator to get to the answer as quick as they can.  But they get lost in what the number represents and don’t know where to go next.  Slow Down and be Neat!  Its a concept that never really occurred to me until I’d spent a decent amount of time tutoring chemistry, in particular empirical formula calculations, basic stoichiomestry, limiting reactant, etc. and have been forcing my students to not only obey the golden rule chemistry math (i.e. “every number needs a unit guys!!), but also to neatly right on their equations and conversions.  Boy what a difference it makes.  You can literally see what to do next fall into place when they take the painstaking time to neatly write things out.  In fact, what has been really sinking in has been that if they carefully right out units “all the way” (i.e. not just “mg”, but “mg Na”) the math just kind of falls into place.  There is a natural tendency to rush to do the math.  It is a trend we have been bucking and working to do the math last.  For folks who like to rush (something in the past I have been guilty of myself), it is a hard habit to create but in the end it turns dividends!

Mastering Vocab and the 3F Rule

A large contingent of the students I tutor are those competing for entry into the nursing program, which means they are all taking A&P and stressed to the max.  Now it’s true that a lot of anatomy can be rote memorization.  But there are 2 major concepts I have been trying to hammer home:

1) Learn Your Roots

The amount of vocab in A&P (and science in general) can be very intimidating.  But if you can learn root words, you can quickly master more than you think you can.  Learn that lysis means “to break” and you can quickly master glycolysis, hydrolysis, lysosome, etc.  Just to name a few.  Learn “gly” or “glyco” hints at sugar and you are well on your way to glycolysis, glycogen, etc.  Learn that most enzymes end with the suffix “ase” and you can quickly identify them on site.  It is a simple concept, but it is shocking the eureka moments I see whenever I explain it to students.  It can really help give them a running start at what they think a new word means…

2) The 3F Rule…”Form follows function”

Again in a effort to simplify things, I have been working a lot on getting students to understand the “flow” of A&P and how amazingly efficient physiological designs are (for the most part; human knees notwithstanding).  A few examples of note from recent sessions:

• The Sarcoplasmic Reticulum is perfectly designed to swath the muscular fiber bundles in a muscle to get uniform contraction across a broad area.
• The spindle fiber machinery of mitosis is really the only logical way you would separate DNA material in a cell.  In a terrific moment, I asked a student “How would you design the process?” as a poor man’s initiation and by golly his design was pretty close!
• The neuron, both its gross morphology as a receiver/transmitter of information, and it’s function as a simple transistor, combined in a web of neurons, is almost exactly how a computer works!
• How could you design a muscle fiber contraction apparatus better than the ratchet-effect of the sliding filament?
• Why is the left ventricle of the human heart so muscular?  Because it has to force blood through the whole body, while he right simply has to get it to the heart of course!
• Plumbers every day install check valves almost identical in design to the tri-cuspid and mitral valves!
• Does not the design of a capillary bed make perfect sense when you realize you want to increase surface area to promote gas exchange?

Another Analogy…But A Work in Progress

I’ve mentioned a number of times the huge power I find in analogies and how key they are to making complex material digestable.  I implemented another useful one the other day.  It was all about diagosing reaction types for intro chemistry students I was helping.  As always, they were getting lost in the weeds on the terminology, and I was loking for a simple way to explain them…

1) Combination Reaction –> A Marriage

2) Decomposition Reaction –> A Divorce

3) A Single Replacement Reaction –> Cheating on your spouse

4) Double Replacement Reaction –> Well…(I need a better way to explain this!…a little too risque I worry)

For better or worse, this turning chemical reactions into interpersonal relationships is REALLY working!