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?

Metal Activity Series…all about the next guy.

I think I’ve said before on here that analogies are to me the BEST way of getting material across.  It is just so easy to boil difficult complex to to easy to understand by bringing them into everyday life.  It’s particularly true I think for high school kids, who quite frankly have a lot on their mind besides Chemistry.

Case in point the other day, I had a girl that was completely overwhelmed by the Metal Activity Series…just the name itself brought blank stares.  She had a homework assignment of reactants in potential single replacement reactions and was to use the series to determine products (if any).  Again blank stares.

Simple analogy.  Metals in the series are a popularity list of boys in school.  On the reactants side, you are already paired up with your guy.  But here comes another guy that wants to take you out..

Now if the guy you are with is more popular than the new guy, no way you change and you stick with the guy you are with.  But

if the new guy is MORE popular on our handy series, then why not upgrade to the new beau.

Voila…within minutes we were flying through the homework.  Now on some level is it terrible that I’ve brought The Hills (for the record never seen the show; don’t even know if it still is a show!) into chemistry class and perpetuated the terrible social stratification of high school kids…Yes…and having been lower on my own high school’s “activity series”, shame on me.  But it worked great…take away the intimidating words (metal activity series, replacement reaction, etc.) and there is little difference in the concepts.