Tuesday, October 21, 2008

One to go

Respiratory systems done. Phew!

It was an exam from Bizarro-Land though. There were only four questions on it.

One question was on something we covered in one tute for about 10 minutes. So that was fun.

Another question was all about what muscles you use to breathe. Hopefully I got the full 1o marks for "diaphragm". About a mark per letter seems fair.

There was a question about predicting all sorts of fancy-pants science things like pH, partial pressures of oxygen and CO2 and haemoglobin saturation for some poor woman who had diabetes and let her blood sugar get too low and OD'd on heroin before smashing her car and choking on the exhaust fumes in the smoking wreck! I just wrote PROGNOSIS NEGATIVE!

And the final question was, for some strange reason, nothing to do with respiratory systems at all. It was about some theoretical model for caring for chronically ill patients which we apparently had a lecture about at some stage. Whoops!

Seems to me that the primary goal of the course co-ordinator (who in the Olden Days we would have called a lecturer, except that this one doesn't lecture. At least not that I saw) was to minimize his marking burden. Kudos to him, I say, as long as my exam burden is minimized too (ie: I hope I don't fail and have to sit a sup.)

I got to the exam a little late and most of the seats were taken, so an invigilator directed me to a free seat. Which was right underneath the asthma poster that I mentioned in my previous post. And there was nothing about asthma on the exam.

This country is stuffed!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This country is indeed stuffed!

How can you be so passionate in the pursuit of mathematical precision in metaphor (I'm very tempted to end this sentence now and not go on to the inevidable second half starting with), but list "Under the Jaguar Sun" as being on the bookshelf when you are only page zero?

Page zero - are you the Khmer Rouge of bibliography?

Page zero is not reading - that's thinking about reading.

Page zero means you've opened the book and flicked past the contents page.

Shame, Lit light, shame.

Baaaa-aaang - that was the sound of your own petard hoisting you, PTR.

PTR said...

Ha ha, I was wondering when I was going to get sprung for that. I picked it up and read the first few paragraphs but I was so tired I couldn't comprehend it at all. In fact, it's possible that I mistakenly bought the Italian edition.

Still, I decided to put it up there because I did "read" some of it. In a way.