Tutoring

Part of my responsibilities as a doctoral student is teaching. I am a TA (teaching assistant) for an Anatomy and Physiology (A&P) class . Here is the irony: I took A&P my sophomore year in undergrad (6 years ago) and I BEARLY passed. If it weren’t for a good man named Dakota Waldroop then I would most likely not be here today. He pulled me through that class. The good thing is that the rest of my undergrad and masters required me to know anatomy in order to understand what was going on. So even though I didn’t learn it very well (according to the standards that I was measured against), I have been able to learn along the way.

Besides grading papers and other secretarial work, I am tutoring students. Last Thursday a group of three students and I sat down for three straight hours of muscle anatomy and function. Man, I loved it. Muscle physiology is pretty cool stuff. I am so amazed and intrigued with how muscles are put together and how they work… its pretty incredible. I am really enjoying tutoring students. I am able to talk about how this material relates to life experiences and future study. I am also able to relate to those students who have trouble studying, I am constantly reminded how Dakota pulled me through those classes and how grateful I am for his intervention in my failing class work. I am hoping I can be that person for these students. I want them to see that the material can be exciting and applicable. I can relate to how they are having trouble integrating the lecture notes. It’s one thing to recognize a word on a page; it’s another to explain what that word means in the context of other complicated words.

Back to last Thurs (all of the students that I was helping were male). We were talking about motor units (a motor unit is composed of a single nerve fiber AND all the muscle fibers that it controls) and how the ratio between nerves and the muscle that it controls has a lot to do with the strength or precision of that aspect of the body. When the neuron “fires” ALL the muscle fibers that it controls will contract at the same time. Some motor units can consist of the one nerve fiber (more appropriately called a neuron) and thousands of muscle fibers. So if a motor unit consists of 1 neuron and 1000 muscle fibers (1/1000) then there will be much more power from that motor unit than a unit consisting of 1 neuron and 10 muscle fibers (1/10). However, the 1/10 ratio will have much more precision than the 1/1000. So I instantly thought of the precision of Carlos Hathcock III who was a sniper in Vietnam. Until 1998 he held the record for the longest kill with a single rifle shot (using a .50 M2 BMG): 2500yds… that’s 1.42 MILES. At that distance he had to use principles of external ballistics: the effect of wind, humidity, heat, pressure, and altitude changes as well as the magnus effect (lower pressure perpendicular to direction of air flow due to spin of the bullet creating downward lift) and the coriolis effect (the effect of the rotation of the earth on projectiles) talk about percision. I loved that example and obviously they did too. Oh, we talked about power lifters vs artists as well, but it sure was fun to talk about one of the greatest snipers to walk this earth.

The point of this blog is to say that I am really enjoying what I am doing. There are things that I don’t enjoy, but what job doesn’t have that?