Acting
I’m not a doctor, but I play one at school.
Loaded class burrito
2 years. Here are all my classes so far:
A little bit excessive, I think.
I’m not a doctor, but I play one at school.
Alright! 599 days of dental school remaining. Plus 4 hours and 56 minutes.
In case you are wondering, yes I am actually serious. That’s the amount of time left in school. Not bad, considering we started at almost 1400 days.
2 years. Here are all my classes so far:
A little bit excessive, I think.
In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a great piece for the New Yorker called “The Art of Failure — Why some people choke and others panic.” The thesis here is that choking is a reversion to basic instruction — the mechanical, poorly-coordinated, unadaptable precepts from one’s basic instruction in a skill. Sports is a great example: as one choke’s, one shows less and less of the practiced grace that come with experience and more and more of the mechanical, simplistic movement characteristic of the novice. The second part of the thesis is this: panicking is a reversion not to basic instruction but to basic instinct. A panic surpasses all training and heads right into lizard-brain survival territory. Here’s a great quote:
I’ve recently unlisted this website with Google, so I do feel a bit more confident in expressing some stronger opinions. I’ll use this new opportunity to make a point about a recent situation at the School of Dentistry. You see, we are currently expected to simultaneously care for patients and continue learning in what’s called a pre-clinical lab. So, we have lab work for fake and real patients. If you take an impression of a patient’s mouth on 8th floor, you have to disinfect it, walk down to 4th floor to get your pre-clinical materials (you don’t want to take a patient’s wet impressions in the elevator alongside other patients), and then climb back up to 9th floor to pour the darn thing up in the clinical lab space (using your pre-clinical materials). See, the school hasn’t given us the tools we need to do clinic work for real patients. We’re in a weird in-between phase. Soon, we’ll transition out of pre-clinic lab. Here’s an excerpt from the email we received:
Afternoon appointments at the University of Minnesota School of Dentistry are scheduled from 1:15 to 4:00 in the afternoon. Here’s something you quickly learn: unless you have a really good reason for taking that long for one patient, you’d better finish up well before four in the afternoon. Expediency makes both the patients and the supervising dentists (under whose licenses we work on patients) much happier. So, in the three o’clock hour, only those dental students experiencing extenuating circumstances (impossible prophy, crown prep marathon, treatment planning issues) remain on the clinic floor, patiently working away. Some days, that’s me; other days, it isn’t. Today, I fixed the problems in my progress note, got it signed by the supervising dentist, and then turned in my dirty instruments and clinic gown to dispensing. Before everyone left at 4, I slipped downstairs to seventh floor to sign up for a radiological interpretation session.
As of 5 minutes ago, I turned in my final case study for physical evaluation II, and I am DONE WITH THE MOST DIFFICULT YEAR OF DENTAL SCHOOL. WOOOOOO!
Never thought I’d get here, frankly. And yet, it’s a beautiful 68° in May, I’m on break for a few weeks until I start in clinic, and life is grand.
I do not think I have ever been this excited for a semester to be over. It is with profound exhaustion that I welcome our 3 weeks off before we begin treating patients. I just found this out: we had 29 credits this fall, and something similar this past semester. The dental school crams a lot of learning into second year: I talked to a professor who graduated in the 1960s, and he said it has just always been like that in school. Glad to hear I have company. Anyhow, my first clinical case is a complete upper and lower denture for (not simultaneously, of course, since we haven’t the chops yet); and I am extremely excited. To think I’ll be practicing my skills at bringing people back into dental function again; making their lives and chewing abilities better, getting them out of pain. I’m so excited to put push hard against the limits of my abilities and, in doing so, improve my clinical skills, knowledge, and judgement.
Jonah Lehrer follows up on his recent Wall Street Journal article with some helpful information about how to not screw-up when the quality of your performance is important. For many people, this would be in a competitive sports-type situation. For me, it’s in the area of cutting teeth for a grade. Here’s an excerpt from Lehrer’s article Don’t Choke : The Frontal Cortex:
Today I learned that love is an action, but centric relation is a feeling.
Professors at the dental school are telling me I should get jaw surgery now, because it’s cheaper while I’m in school (anything less than $25,000 is… cheaper). They’re telling me I could lose my teeth. School says I can’t remember enough, that I’m not coordinated enough, not disciplined enough. This is the first time they’ve said I’m not put together correctly.
Every time I think I’ve got the dental school thing down, I just get crushed flat by something going wrong. Lately, it’s been these practicals. We’re trained to cut teeth to very stringent guidelines — previously, we were simply graded on the degree to which we met these guidelines. NOW, we only pass if every single aspect of our tooth cutting meets a clinically acceptable standard. Otherwise, we fail: one failure requires a make-up… two failures and, well, I’m not sure.
778 days 22 minutes until I get a DDS degree.
From “the more things change, the more they stay the same” desk at tumbledry HQ: a quote that, I think, you may find applicable. (I hope Katy finds it enlightening, as well):
I will not go for a doctorate, because it would be of little help to me, and the whole comedy has become boring.
Once you learn what is expected of you, the tooth cutting strategy for placing silver fillings actually makes sense. All lines should be crisp, smooth, and flowing. You must cut in such a way that you prevent the tooth from cracking and avoid drilling into the bloody and full-of-nerves pulp. You must also cut in such a way that the silver you place does not crack when your patient bites food. Finally, you must make sure that the silver stays put in the tooth.
Words of wisdom, from Dr. Rohrer (during Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology studying):
Don’t ever throw tissue away
You’ll have trouble explaining to your kids why you can’t afford to send them to college.
Almost forgot to mention: National Dental Board Examination, Part 1 = PASS! Honestly didn’t expect that one, since illness and burn-out severely curtailed my winter break studying efforts. Nevertheless, PASS it is. EXCELLENT! And since I’m not looking to specialize, I needn’t stress out about the score itself.
Keith Jarrett and neuroscience. Sympathetically innervated sweat glands are the exception when it comes to neurotransmitters — their transmitter is acetylcholine, but you would expect norepinephrine! Whoah!
It’s the Köln Concert.
I checked out a blog I haven’t looked at in a while, and… dooce still has it. Here’s a paragraph from her letter to her daughter on the occasion of her daughter’s 6th birthday:
I remember the last exam I took in the last class I had in college and the feeling afterward being unlike anything I could describe, like I’d just been let out of a prison I had been in since I was five years old. Welcome to that prison. Only it’s worse! You have to take tests and earn good grades! At least in prison you can write on the walls and hit people!
Everyday, I want to become better, but I don’t mean that in a small way. I want to be wholly… Faster. Smarter. Nicer. Stronger. More imaginative. Pursuing these ideals drives me, like the fire drives the steam engine, from the inside. This all worked for me, back when I showed up to a job and then went home at peace… I pursued my own goals and reached for the gold rings that I put in front of me.
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