Information underload

This is the bit where I complain (again) about being lucky enough to study medicine.

We had a lecture today which purported to be about the menstrual cycle. It was incomprehensible. Now, I appreciate that it's a complex topic, so it's unlikely that I was going to come out of that lecture unscathed. But the guy who presented it to us did us no favours either.

He may well know his stuff back to front and inside out, but I seriously think I could have given a better lecture than him with just five minutes preparation. He didn't ever seem to summarize or recap or explain or do any of those good pedagogical things.

It got even worse when someone asked him a question and it sounded like he was making up the answer. It went like this:

Q: Could you explain again how luteinizing hormone causes the follicle to release the ovum?

A: "Well it's simple, the way that, the thing is that, LH stimulates FSH, until it's high, and by high what I mean is that it's not dropping so fast as it was before, estrogen doesn't, I mean, how long have you got? I could give you a 200 page book on this stuff."

Not very convincing. He wouldn't last 2 minutes in my old PBL group. We could bullshit for 3 hours much more fluently than that.

Then later on today there was an outrage perpetrated by a different lecturer. In the course of trying to explain how to use trigonometry to find the distance from the beach in Chennai to the cricket stadium (the guy was ambitiously trying to distract us from the fact that his lecture was Content Free (tm) by weaving a line through Auckland, Mount Everest, surveying, Chennai, and antenatal oxygen tension, not necessarily in that order), he claimed that if you know the length of one side of a triangle and one of the angles that you can calculate the length of another side. Oh, sorry, I meant to end that sentence like this: "... another side!!!" I can tell you're shocked.

I shouted out to him that he needed to know two angles (yes, another side will also do, but that's not how you do geological surveying) but he chose to ignore me, clearly recognizing that I spoke with the Voice Of Authority and was not to be trifled with.

The War On Innumeracy rages on.