Grad School- TAing

Professor Sunshine volunteered me to teach a lab course for med students in exchange for the department paying my tuition and fees. Oh joy! Now I want to make it very clear that in TAing this course, I seldom interacted with the “good” med students. By “good” I mean the ones that show up having read the material they were instructed to read and that have a plan of action on what they need to get done in lab that day. These “good” students showed up asked questions about techniques or questions about the location of materials they needed, did their work and left- generally in less than 2 hours (lab was scheduled for 5 hours, the grad students and the “good” med students in the class could generally complete the labs in under 2 hours). I got to interact with all the students that didn’t complete the required reading and didn’t pay attention during the pre-lab lecture. My undergrad program had a strict policy of “if you’re not prepared, you flunk the lab because you are a safety hazard to yourself and those working around you” so I have very little tolerance for not being prepared. I think that if that type of responsibility was expected of me as an 18 year old, it can be expected of a med student that is generally 22 years old. I typically answered these students’ questions with “what does your lab manual say?” Needless to say, I was not a popular TA among this crowd. The most common question I was asked? That would be “Is this going to be on the exam?” Seriously? I thought that by the time you left 7th grade you’d have been taught that this is the one question you should never ask because the answer is always “Yes! It most certainly will be on the exam!”

My favorite story from TAing this class actually comes from the year before I started TAing, when I was required to take the class myself. One of the labs in this course taught how to isolate bacteria from the upper respiratory tract. Residents (doctors who are 2 and 3 years out of med school themselves) would come and demonstrate the proper technique for swabbing a patient’s throat. Then, the students in the class would have to practice the technique on each other. As part of the lab instruction for this class, students were given samples of various pathogenic bacteria, such as streptococcus, so that they could see what the infectious bacteria of the upper respiratory tract look like under a microscope and when cultured on a plate. This is essentially the parts of a throat culture that are generally done by licensed medical technicians but that rural doctors need to know because they often have to do these tests themselves. Well, the med students in this class decided to dip the throat swabs in these cultures before swabbing each other’s throats. Why? I have no clue! It certainly wasn’t in the demonstration I observed by the residents! I still have no idea why they thought culturing a patient’s throat involves inoculating the patient’s throat with infectious bacteria. I do know that at the beginning of the course, it was stressed that they were going to be working with actual pathogenic material, including clinical samples, and they should take all precautions (coats, gloves, goggles to protect their eyes). However, of the class of 150 or so med students, 127 med students were diagnosed with strep throat in the week following this lab. The consequence of this epidemic was that in subsequent years we were no longer permitted to use pathogenic bacteria in this laboratory course! Personally, I find it absolutely frightening that first year med students can’t be trusted not to infect themselves. Makes you wonder exactly what caliber of doctor we’re training in this country...