!Uninterested
---
agk's diary
11 November 2021 @ 19:52
---
written on Pinebook Pro
while my baby sporadically breastfeeds
---
I guess one of my big problems with school is how
bored I get. I get docked for turning in assignments
an hour after they're due; I don't have to redo
mastery assignments like many students because I nail
it the first time, but have to drive 90 minutes to
the manditory practice session and 90 minutes home; I
score 88%--90% on exams but get lectured for leaving
my camera off during Zoom meetings. I project a good
attitude, but sometimes it slips.
Clinicals are great. I'm rebuilding confidence on the
floor, and have a stellar clinical instructor. The
material in classes is good review, but busywork
kills me, as does grading not just on performance on
the floor and cognitive/psychomotor recall (knowledge
and skill), and adherence to a non-individualized
learning program that bores me to distraction.
My brain rebels against what feels like the equivalent
of re-reading a phone book, storing patterns in short-
term memory for examination. It's better if I have
fellow students who are learning this stuff for the
first time, and I can help them recognize patterns and
relationships, make it real, or invent good mnemonics.
But we're distanced, which is the only way I can
manage nursing school in another county with a baby.
I'm sure there are other problems, but I struggle
terribly with boredom through each garbled Yuja Media
video of a powerpoint lecture and slow-loading Vital-
Source textbook-as-a-service webapp table. I'm
uninterested, trying to find anything new in the
material, suppress critique, learn the program's party
line.
I have so many questions, so much curiosity---about
med, supply, and staff shortages, the transition to
majority-traveler staffing, rollup of doctor groups
and long-term-care by private equity firms, sinking
of municipal bond markets into hospital hypertrophy;
how pricing, billing and upcoding work, the value of
financialized debt vs repayment, marketing of disease
and risk factors, how nursing is a critique of medicine,
how to apply nursing knowledge at the bedside, teach
with confidence, and promote peer recovery and support
networks from within disease palaces....
Meanwhile, always there, the message of school: "If
you log on to your exam three minutes late, that's a
problem and it will affect your grade."
