Back to School Grind/What Kind of Student Were You?
Back to School Grind
A Day in the Life of the Bookworm Family: Yesterday (Labor Day) was the day before school officially starts. If I hadn't got a URI (upper respiratory infection AKA cold) over the weekend, we would have spent one day at the zoo and one day at the beach this weekend in honor of our last minute summer break requests.
Instead, yesterday we:
- went to one of our favorite beaches, the one with the tidepools, the one near the bagel shop we love. So we had a bagel sandwich picnic (salad for Mr. Bookworm as his diet is gluten free) and on the way home we had Thrifty ice cream just like the kind my Lolo used to get me and my sisters and cousins when we were little. We paid around $4 for all four of us!
- cleaned out our backpacks from last year. Yup. I'm a procrastinator. I DO NOT buy the Bookworm girls a new back back every year, just every few years as needed. It feels wasteful when their old backpacks are still in good shape. I also hold onto the old, old backpacks because I feel funny about dumping them into the, well, dump. Mini Me actually cleaned out her backpack a week or two ago, but she prepped it for tomorrow. In Little Lion's backpack, I found all sort of twigs, rocks, clear pink hued machine-made stones, acorns, a miniature pine cone, stickers, paper, and a teeny tiny origami swan that one of her best friends made for her.
- played on wii x 2. The girls rediscovered our old console this summer. It's been good and bad—they bond together while playing, but they also sometimes bicker over whose turn it is too. With school starting, they'll only get to play on the weekends so I let them get in extra playtime yesterday.
- chose clothes for today and I ironed the girls back-to-school outfits. In truth I ironed four different outfits for Little Lion because she is planning on wearing her Lafayette costume but I don't know if she'll change her mind.
- Also, last week I re-applied the temporary green dye to Mini Me's hair so it would 'pop' for back to school. :D
What Kind of Student Were You?
I was a procrastinator. And I also was a student who was over-prepared and over-studied. Just in two different times of my life as a student!
When I was in college, I was NOT pre-med, but I did end up majoring in Biology (my other major was English/Creative Writing. And for most of my biology classes, I would prep the week before before tests and midterms. Before laptops were commonly in classrooms and before smartphones, you had to take really good notes. And I was a very detailed and fast note-taker. So I would divide up my notes into equal amounts, say five pages a night, and the proceed to memorize and understand every single word on every single page. So, yeah, I did very well in my major.
Fast-forward to med school. I was in a bit of shock. We had a million classes all day long with our entire class and then we were supposed to study afterward. It was overwhelming and there was a LOT of material to be learned in a short amount of time. I also had a bit of insomnia so I would stay up until 2 am every night doing I don't know what. Mostly reading, watching tv, going to interrupt my friends in the med school dorm from studying, working on my Masters' thesis, and also a bit of studying. But I would procrastinate the studying so the night before exams, I'd stay up all night and read the entire syllabus and cross my fingers that I'd pass the test. I usually did. But it all went into my short term memory.
Now (like most doctors), I'm a lifelong student. I look up things that I already know and things I don't know and I look up and study how things have changed. I like to review the current literature and I always like to look up and review something that my patient may or may not have. But I hope that's what makes me a good doctor: if I think of you, I will usually call you to check in. If I stay up at night because you have something that we just haven't figured out yet (with or without specialty help), then I'm researching things at home. Or contacting the specialists again. Because it's my job to do the best I can for my patients. I may not always be right, but I try my best to always be compassionate and caring.
Tell Dr. Bookworm!
What kind of student were you? Procrastinator? Over-prepared? Breezing through like Mr. Bookworm did on his SATs but still scored higher than me after months of prepwork?
