Learning Experience: Learning Through the Skull

Learning Experience: Learning Through the Skull

When I began college, I took everything that professors said at face value.  I believed that they had earned PhDs for a reason and, therefore, knew all of the information and always had the correct answers.  However, during my time at TCU, I have been taught to question what I am learning and form my own judgments on what is true or correct.  In particular, as I have moved up in my education and been taking more and more complicated courses, I have found that sometimes the answers are unknown not only to me, but to my professors, and even the top researchers on the subject.  Not always having the answers has taught me to question what I read and speculate about what I think is occurring in a set of data or a piece of literature rather than just accepting the conclusions that the author came to. 

            Yesterday I had a learning experience that made me look back on how far I’ve come during college in my thinking and reasoning ability.  A friend and I are teaching assistants for Anatomy and Physiology.  This is a class primarily composed of freshman nursing students who have not yet gone through this critical thinking transformation that I have experienced while in college.  Yesterday’s lab was over the bones of the axial skeleton, which includes the skull and the spinal column.  As most of the students were finishing up and getting ready to leave, my friend and I picked up one of the skulls that had a large lump at the top if its head.  Rather than just accepting that this person had had a skull deformity, we began to speculate about what could have caused this problem.  We noticed that his (we assume this was his gender) wisdom teeth hadn’t grown it yet indicating that he was only around 20 years old at the time of death, but he already had several gold teeth.  Based on these findings and others, we guessed that he had may have suffered a traumatic brain injury called contrecoup where the brain bounces in the skull and is injured at a point opposite that of the impact site we could see on the skull.

            This experience reminded me of the importance of being able to work things out without any details or anything being handed to me by the professor, and we actually found it to be fun.  It was like a logic puzzle, but this one didn’t have any known correct answer.  As a future physical therapist, I will often see patients with minimal medical history and have to use my own knowledge and skills to determine what is wrong with them and then formulate an effective treatment plan.  Doing similar activities in the classroom as I did yesterday helps to prepare me to do this in real life situations once I finish graduate school.  Our friend with the skull injury may be beyond saving, but my physical therapy patients won’t be, and experiences at TCU like this one set me up for success in my future career.