Thursday, October 21, 2004

ProBLems

Interesting news. Today Prof Wong Mee Lian popped in during our PBL session to ask us whether we wanted to conduct Session 1 of PBL units in Semester Two by ourselves i.e. without a facilitator. Which was kind of shocking to even imagine. It seems that KDR received some feedback last year that many students would rather conduct Session 1 on their own. Which is true, but somehow KDR does not know (he's supposed to be a doctor, and he doesn't ask for the reason behind this view?) that the reason why we told him that is because most of us had stoopid Biochemistry tutors for our PBL last year, who gave us stoopid learning issues like what is pain and what causes it, and needed us to tell them what was going on instead of it being the other way around.

So I told WML that if we have clinical tutors in charge, it would be much much better since the clinical tutor would be able to guide us along and give us some anecdotes about similar cases they've seen in their practice. Personally my PBL tutor Prof Lim Lean Huat is a stellar tutor, because he tells us so many stories of all the patients he sees, although he gets carried away and ends up talking for like 3 hours. And WML agreed totally, and reassured us that the tutors for next semester would all be clinical professors. Which sounded like very good news to me, because I am sick of having non-clinical people running my PBLs, especially after having such a great prof for one semester.

But then again you never know, some clinical professors are not as good as you might think them. I heard for Stella's group the tutor just heaps them with learning issues that are non-specific and not very useful at all.

Let's just wait and see how things turn out. PBL might become something useful after all.


Academic stress, I can take, albeit at the cost of a few more white hairs. But I am really starting to buckle under the strains of social relationships. It seems like the more people you know, the more stress you are under to constantly maintain those ties with some talk and greetings, and sometimes you just don't want to care anymore. Sometimes I think I trust people too much, that I assume they will treat me as a friend because I treat them as one, but far too often already I have been disappointed when people betray my trust in them. It is a truly bitter feeling to find that your trust in some people has been grossly misplaced, and you find it so difficult to ever trust any person again, not just that person that hurt you. And yet I feel that having to live with the constant fear that other people will harm you once you let your guard down is so painful and lonely.

I won't stop trusting people. I just have to hope they don't give me any reason to see that my trust is placed in the wrong place.

Avaris / 10/21/2004 07:41:00 PM

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