!Uninterested
 --- 
agk's diary 
11 November 2021 @ 19:52
 --- 
written on Pinebook Pro 
while my baby sporadically breastfeeds
 --- 

I guess one of my big problems with school is how 
bored I get. I get docked for turning in assignments 
an hour after they're due; I don't have to redo 
mastery assignments like many students because I nail 
it the first time, but have to drive 90 minutes to 
the manditory practice session and 90 minutes home; I 
score 88%--90% on exams but get lectured for leaving 
my camera off during Zoom meetings. I project a good 
attitude, but sometimes it slips. 

Clinicals are great. I'm rebuilding confidence on the 
floor, and have a stellar clinical instructor. The 
material in classes is good review, but busywork
kills me, as does grading not just on performance on 
the floor and cognitive/psychomotor recall (knowledge 
and skill), and adherence to a non-individualized 
learning program that bores me to distraction.

My brain rebels against what feels like the equivalent 
of re-reading a phone book, storing patterns in short-
term memory for examination. It's better if I have 
fellow students who are learning this stuff for the 
first time, and I can help them recognize patterns and 
relationships, make it real, or invent good mnemonics. 
But we're distanced, which is the only way I can 
manage nursing school in another county with a baby.

I'm sure there are other problems, but I struggle 
terribly with boredom through each garbled Yuja Media 
video of a powerpoint lecture and slow-loading Vital-
Source textbook-as-a-service webapp table. I'm 
uninterested, trying to find anything new in the 
material, suppress critique, learn the program's party 
line.

I have so many questions, so much curiosity---about
med, supply, and staff shortages, the transition to 
majority-traveler staffing, rollup of doctor groups 
and long-term-care by private equity firms, sinking 
of municipal bond markets into hospital hypertrophy; 
how pricing, billing and upcoding work, the value of 
financialized debt vs repayment, marketing of disease
and risk factors, how nursing is a critique of medicine, 
how to apply nursing knowledge at the bedside, teach 
with confidence, and promote peer recovery and support 
networks from within disease palaces....

Meanwhile, always there, the message of school: "If
you log on to your exam three minutes late, that's a
problem and it will affect your grade."