Still Bugging Me
A few months we had a lecture on altitude illnesses by a doctor who works in a clinic in Nepal. He talked about how 90 pound kids would lug their 100 pound gear for two dollars, and they let them provide this service because 2 dollars American means a lot in their economy. While I understand that, here's an interesting epiphany...how about giving the kid the two dollars and additionally paying someone who can actually carry this stuff. just a thought.
So I bring up this fact in a small group, and a students who has been to Peru says the natives do very much the same thing for a few dollars because "that's a lot of money in Peru" Um, yeah I bet most of my relatives would sooner tell him to kiss their collective asses than carry his shit up a mountain.
I just have these moments when I look around and wonder where the hell these people came from. For instance, in class we had a 60 year old man talk about his experience with prostate cancer. During his talk, he had this nervous laugh which resulted in quite a few people laughing at him. This to me was extremely rude. Apparently they need to be warned that a real person is on stage; it's not a film clip.
They also do this sort of thing in lecture. Right after it's over and the lecturer is still at the podium you can hear people say "worst lecture ever" and the like.
Plus at another point we had an acted out clinical encounter in which a physician said something like "well it looks like you didn't have an MI and your pulmonary infiltrates are improving so you most likely had a pneumonia." The actress portraying the patient appeared confused-end scene. We were then asked what happened and not one of them could see how a patient with no formal medical knowledge and with english as her second language would not understand what her doctor said. Furthermore, they contributed the confused face to pain.
Well, I guess its in these areas that I make a contribution to the class...it's certainly not a sciency-intellectual type contribution but an important one just the same.
So I bring up this fact in a small group, and a students who has been to Peru says the natives do very much the same thing for a few dollars because "that's a lot of money in Peru" Um, yeah I bet most of my relatives would sooner tell him to kiss their collective asses than carry his shit up a mountain.
I just have these moments when I look around and wonder where the hell these people came from. For instance, in class we had a 60 year old man talk about his experience with prostate cancer. During his talk, he had this nervous laugh which resulted in quite a few people laughing at him. This to me was extremely rude. Apparently they need to be warned that a real person is on stage; it's not a film clip.
They also do this sort of thing in lecture. Right after it's over and the lecturer is still at the podium you can hear people say "worst lecture ever" and the like.
Plus at another point we had an acted out clinical encounter in which a physician said something like "well it looks like you didn't have an MI and your pulmonary infiltrates are improving so you most likely had a pneumonia." The actress portraying the patient appeared confused-end scene. We were then asked what happened and not one of them could see how a patient with no formal medical knowledge and with english as her second language would not understand what her doctor said. Furthermore, they contributed the confused face to pain.
Well, I guess its in these areas that I make a contribution to the class...it's certainly not a sciency-intellectual type contribution but an important one just the same.