Outlook: Grim

[lydy]

Well, Chap. 3 of Bio doesn't look to be any easier than Chap. 2. I only got 95% on the quiz (20 questions, so I missed one). Given that it was open book and I had just gone through the chapter again, that's just not so good. I think that biochemistry and I will never be good friends.

Chap. 3 is all about cell function, including cell respiration. More biochemistry. I read it and comprehend almost none of it. That's actually a fascinating sensation, but I'd rather try it out in an interesting fiction book that I'm not reading for class. Having nice, discrete facts go mush is very bizarre. This isn't even flash card material, yet. I haven't parsed it well enough to tear it down into flash card sized info bites. I'm used to retaining a bit more detail from a simple read, and this was more than just a simple one. I was trying to concentrate. Maybe going to school isn't like falling off a bicycle, after all.

I'm hoping for a hard-fought A in this class, but I'm thinking it'll be more like a hard-fought B. I would hate for it to be a C a whole lot. Ds and Fs don't bear thinking about. I'd like to hate my Psych course, but just at the moment, I don't have the energy for it. Keeping up with the reading in both classes is about to become very difficult. Thank god for Algebra. (I am experiencing cognitive dissonance, now. All in all, I'm wondering if now is really the best time to be reading The Butterfly Kid.)

Comments

[davidschroth.livejournal.com]

Why do you regard 95% on an open-book quiz as not good?

The professor types I know, when they talk about open book tests, are pretty clear that they write open-book tests to test comprehension of the material, rather than rote ability to parrot back memorized material.

Just don't let the bastids wear you down - we know you can do it.

[buttonlass.livejournal.com]

To be fair profs make open book tests harder. Really. Just ask my professor husband.:)

For my part I'm good at chem and bio but the combined things that go into cell respiration suck. What book are you using? You're hitting the same things in the same chapters I did. When I had this stuff last fall the book was next to useless, the professor summed it up ok and I managed through it, but it was my worst section. Everything after that was easier. I got lucky because my prof dropped our lowest grade and this subject was it.

Hang in there. I don't think school is like falling off a bike. I worked hard at getting back in the right mind set but it does improve. Honest.

[mom23cats.livejournal.com]

wow! 95 is great!!! any open book test I had was alway harder!! good job!!

med students of my acquaintance

[(Anonymous)]

twenty-odd years ago, called biochemistry -- which they had to take -- 'bagoragistry', because, well, they hated it. It was hard, and no amount of memorization really worked to produce understanding, but lots and lots of memorization was required.

Especially if bits of the subject are bouncing clean off, that's a sign not that you're insufficiently diligent or ept, but that you're missing some chunk of conceptual framework.

Biochem is plain old honest-to-Tiwaz complicated; three billion years of happenstance and selection and a splendid demonstration of Twain's dictum about things that wouldn't work in fiction. There is a conceptual framework, there are at least two powerful ones, but they're organic chemistry and molecular evolutionary biology. If those aren't required courses, complete understanding is not what your instructors are after.

Trying to find other explanations than your present text may be helpful; trying to find a structural overview might help, too, the 'what is going on here?' rather than the 'how the ATP is extracted' description. (Even, say, _why_ there are different kinds of aerobic and anaerobic metabolism.)

There is a lot of this stuff on the web, too; this guy http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/C/CellularRespiration.html
seems like a decent overview, and it might be sufficiently different from your text (or just hyperlinked enough :) to stick better.

-- Graydon

[pameladean]

If you can formulate an actual question, you might want to send it to Eric. He was just teaching some of that stuff, though not at your level.

P.

Re: med students of my acquaintance

[lydy.livejournal.com]

That link was a load of help, Graydon. Thank you.

Part of my problem with this course, I think, is that it's web based. There are no lectures. It's me, my text book, and I. This is not what I had expected. The only additional material I have to work with are the study aids that the text book publisher has on the web. Now, these do include cute little animations, a mock quiz, and flash cards, so there's a bunch of stuff there. But it doesn't really say it differently. I had kind of assumed that it would be like a correspondence course where you get the lectures in writing. Nope.

Biochem is plain old honest-to-Tiwaz complicated; three billion years of happenstance and selection and a splendid demonstration of Twain's dictum about things that wouldn't work in fiction.

I have this image of Barbie saying, "Evolution is hard."

Re: med students of my acquaintance

[(Anonymous)]

You're welcome!

Evolution isn't hard; evolution is one of those terribly simple ideas that changes everything. (F=ma; continents move, the speed of light in a vacuum is an absolute, many more are born than can possibly survive.)

(Ok, ok, there are the five characteristics of a Darwinian individual, too, and the notion of population and the question of the unit of selection, which is slightly tricky in say, social insects, but evolution as a set of ideas is elegantly simple.)

Understanding the specific _results_ of a long period of evolution, which is what most biochemistry is, that's hard, because that isn't (mostly) about general principles, it's about the horrid details of the million typing monkeys trying for Shakespeare and sometimes getting Rousseau.

If it's a pure web course, that's highly sub-optimal in some ways -- no instructor or TA you can plausibly hunt down and say 'explain this to me differently, please' -- but it does also mean that there's no particular reason to follow the specific course materials, since your objective is being able to pass their tests, not to interact with the instructor and your classmates in a useful way.

-- Graydon

Web courses

[nancymcc.livejournal.com]

Aargh! Web courses are VERY rarely well-designed. The methodologies are too much in their infancy. Think of how bad many textbooks are, and how many years of "evolution" have supposed to improved them overall.

And this sounds like one of those subjects that needs live interaction.

OK, this is crazy, but.... Can you drop it and take it again when you can also sign up to audit a REAL course beforehand or concurrently?

I've been teaching Photoshop, etc, in a university-based Professional Development Center. My classes were live. Several students have volunteered that the program's non-live courses (on other topics) were basically worthless.