"And it's 'Go, Boys, go!' They'll Time Your Every Breath" OR 53 God-Damned %

No. The above is not an accurate representation of my grade on my anatomy mid-term test. Although I should probably wish it was. The above figure is an accurate representation of the number of students who failed my mid-term anatomy test. I have no idea where I rank among them, but I suspect my place is with the majority. And probably not in any sort of flattering position within that spectrum. However, all was not lost, and this leads to an extended, if reasonably pointless, story about my anatomy professor. From thence it will probably jump into a general rambling about school in general.

Dr. Ranney is a strange man. He is often insufferably stodgy, and by "often" I mean 99% of the time. He is also a passionate Creationist, and explained on the first day of lecture that after a lifetime of working with the human body he could come to no other conclusion. For 30 years he was the man to come to for anatomy; Indeed he is the founder of UW's School of Anatomy. He has often reminisced of the fact that he was given a 2-day interview, the purpose of which was actually to lure him in. He built the program from the ground up and made sure to include the use of cadavers in mandatory labs for anatomy students, a rarity in a university without a medical school. So, as I said, very stodgy, very uptight. He is 75 years old, and retired from teaching anatomy at UW a decade ago. A very unfortunate accident on the part of the man who replaced him caused Dr. Ranney to be asked to come back and teach this year. Every day he walks into the lecture hall in his winter jacket and greek fisherman's hat. He arrives in time to begin a regular lecture, except that no lecture with Dr. Ranney is ever regular because he can't figure out how to use powerpoint. So class is usually 5 or 10 minutes late starting. The powerpoints don't match the coursenotes usually, and I would always rather be sleeping than hearing Dr. Ranney lecture. I may have said it before, but, if it were not for the lab portion of anatomy class, I would probably have stopped going to lectures.

So it is always a bit of a surprise when Dr. Ranney does something un-stodgy and out of the ordinary. It's only happened twice. The first ocurred while viewing the anatomy of the vertibrae. He was asked what the popping sounds the spine makes during a chiropractic adjustment were. He gave the standard response: gas bubbles escaping, etc. I then expected a lecture from an old and distinguished MD about the dangers of chiropractic. I should have known better. Dr. Ranney loves chiropractors, and maintains that he has always done so. This does make sense as the man in charge of the anatomy lab sections, Hugh Scoggan, was head of the School of Anatomy at CMCC for a time.

The second unexpected thing Dr. Ranney did happened yesterday. Class was late starting as per usual, and he had also had trouble setting his microphone. He had presumeably made several attempts to quiet the class while adjusting the levels, but I didn't hear anything until I heard him yell something very tersely through the microphone. I can't remember it exactly, but it was to the effect of "Please stop chatting. You've all performed terribly on the mid-term and you've shamed me quite thoroughly". However, once that caught our attention he got control of his temper and began the lecture. He rushed us through it in order to talk to us more about the mid-term. He prefaced the talk by saying that his wife had suggested he give us the choice of good news or bad news. It was then that he dropped the 53% bomb. He explained that upon hearing the news himself he had first experienced a great ammount of disappointment in us. This was par for the course. However, he went on to explain that he immediately felt a great ammount of disappointment in himself as well. With that sentence he went from being a scolding parent unhapy with his children's failure, to a parent trying to explain to his children how he has fialed them. With heartbreaking convcition he led us through his appologies. He explained that he was mad at the faculty: apparently anyone taking anatomy but not in the Kin program was disallowed form taking the lab and Dr. Ranney announced his intention to denounce them as "greedy bastards" once he had compiled the proper statistical information by May. He went on to say that he had always been against teaching the course in first year, that he would be posting practice quizzes on the course website, that the final would be easier, and then he dropped the real bomb.

He had been listening to his favourite music (what great composer? Which classics from how long ago? Did he develop a taste for it while attaining his Fellowship across the pond?): Songs of the Revolution from Cuba. While so doing he had come to the conclusion that something needed to be done to help us. However, as he had explained to us in the past, he does not bell curve marks. So he decided to raise everyone's marks according to a sliding scale (which, for obvious reasons, he would not elaborate on). "Like the agrarian distribution of land in Cuba" he gave the most to the people at the bottom, but still gave something to those at the top. As it stands now, 9% of my class will recieve failing grades on the mid-term, and, after adjustment, only 8% of the class will recieve a grade above 80. Dr. Ranney is a strange man, but after laying himself bare in fornt of 300 people and taking on our failure as his own, I couldn't very well stand up and tell him I failed because I didn't study enough.

In other scholastic news, I have a new physiology teacher. He's Indian and has low blood-pressure. He also definately knows his shit when it comes to this course. There's only one problem: he's a little hard to understand. I would normally lambast him with a comment like "The fucker can't speak fucking english", but he can. He just has trouble with a few of the letters. For example, while teaching us the basic anatomy of the heart he eventually got talking about the valves. Trouble is, he can't say "v". It comes out sounding like "walls". I actually panicked and started flipping ahead in the notes to find the section on the heart-walls he had apparently jumped to.

Lastly, I have been feeling a little down about school lately. I don't look forward to classes, and although labs still hold my attention they are the minority of my week. I've been considering dropping my program once I finish this term. So, while I was in Psych on Tuesday night the lecture was on motivation. I only fell asleep once, during the start, when he was talking about Freud's ideas on motivation. I probably didn't miss much. I can guess that Freud believed people were motivated by sex and agression, and that getting either of those reinforced the behavior. Eventually we got onto the work of Deci. Deci was the last person on a list of several who improved a basic model for motivation which looks like this:

It starts with a person (who has needs, wants, desires), who initiates a behavior, which causes an outcome. It's about as simple as it can get. The other psychologists before him had added things to it, but Deci's major contribution was the idea of intrinsic and extrinsic value. His idea is that some behaviours are motivated by the intrinsic value that goes along with doing them, while others are motivated by the extrinsic value of some kind of reward at the end. Most are a mix of the two. His theory was brilliant because it explains things like children's play, which has no purpose or useufl outcome. But children do it all the time anyway. However, my prof was quick to mention that the focus, especially in education, is on extrinsic value these days. And it's true! All through grade school no one had a choice about what they did. I was continually encouraged to go for the As, and I did mainly because it was bloody easy, not because I was passionate about writing poetry or doing long division. I also got rewards: cash, praise from teachers and parents, and later additions/upgrades for my drum kit. Things changed a bit in high-school, but not much. We got to start picking our courses, but with University looming in the shadows the focus on grades was worse than before. Each year we got more freedom to choose our studies, but it was more than counterbalanced by the need to achieve as Uni got another step closer to reality. And really, can anyone say that they never took a course, or considered taking a course, because they were looking for an easy A?

In grade 12 (or 13 for most of us) we were finally ready. We'd picked our courses and we were applying to Universities. Finally we were getting to a place that would let us do whatever we wanted and learn about whatever we wanted. It was electrifying to be doing exactly what we wanted. But as soon as we arrived things got back to the status quo. University, at least for me, had all but lost its intrinsic value by the second week of this term. Once gain I need to aim for the top. I need to take another chemistry course this term because if I don't I can't be eligible for the Pre-Health Professions option. I've got 12 grand riding on this little adventure, and if I flunk out 3/4 of it's gonna start gaining interest not in my favour. God help me if I'd gotten a scholarship.

But, after thinking about it, I'm ready to get back into things. The thrill of learning has been lost to me for some time. I can still do it, but now I'm actually trying to remember why I bother.

So that's school. What else has Liam gotten up to since you last saw him? Some, but not a lot. On saturday I rented Ghost in the Shell 2 with Ben. It was decent. I've already commented about it on Ellen's blog, but allow me to retrace my thoughts: The original GITS movie (c 1995) kicked ass. It was a brilliantly animated mix of mind blowing violence and introspection on the nature of life, sentience, humanity, etc. Fucking brilliant. The voice acting was terrible. Fucking terrible. I honestly wondered at the time if the actors had perhaps been (much like ABBA) trained to speak the words phonetically, without any idea of their meanings. GITS2 has a) better animation and b) better and more violence. However, it is over twice the length of the original, and the intervening time is spent dwelling even more than the last one on the more esoteric qualities of the film, which are presented less forwardly. I don't enjoy watching movies where I feel that half of the reason it was made is shooting over my head. However, there was no voice acting. The movie is only available in Japanese, so subtitles are the way to go. I actually prefer subtitles in a lot of the anime I've watched. After watching the GITS Tv series with subtitles I found it almost impossible to stomach an episode in English that I saw on YTV at Carl's. However, in this movie, the subtitles were ridiculous. They had, apparently, decided to save money by doing the English subtitles and the English closed captioning together instead of seperately. The result was well translated dialogue punctuated by subtitles like "Singing in Japanese" and "Footsteps", which went a long way towards massacring my suspension of disbelief.

When I got back to school I was looking for Blood Brothers CDs on DC++ (McLeod loves them so I figured I'd give em a listen), and noticed that one of the people I was DLing from also had Requiem for a Dream, which has remained on the back-burner of things to see ever since Jenn did a monologue from it during her last season in Playmakers!. It finished very quickly, and, dear god, all I can say is never do drugs!!! If you haven't seen it, do so. If you have, I don't need to go on.

And I don't anyway.