What the Classroom Couldn’t Teach, the Theatre Did — Just Not All at Once

Hi,Good morning everyone

Growing to this extent, I got to appreciate the fact that somethings might not be hard to grasp ,but, maybe they are just too much for our brain at the point in time we were trying to read them.

That's why Jeans Piaget, a swiss developmental psychologist would say that "true logical and abstract reasoning doesn't develop until the formal operational stage which is from age 11 and above."

Take for instance, you are teaching a two year old boy how to solve a statistics question, do you think he or she will ever get to understand it now matter how simplified you make it look?

It's a No! Not because the child is a dullard neither is it because the child isn't interested in learning it despite paying all his or her attention in the world, but, it is because his brain hasn't developed to the extent of understanding that particular teachings.

Personally, I have found lots of things very difficult to grasp even while I was in the University, but for the purpose of this prompt, let me talk about the one that got clearer recently.

While finishing up from medical school, it was necessary for us to be able to identify some of the instruments used in the theatre for different surgeries. Instead of teaching us from the onset or maybe for series of time because it's not easy to grasp all those instruments just in one sitting, our lecturers chose to leave us struggling with knowing them ourselves even when we never knew the right one...

You might argue that it obviously was learnable and we have different gadgets to help us learn and you wouldn't be wrong but guess what? We also did all you thought we would have done. We got to the YouTube, look up some pictures and videos but guess what? We couldn't even access the equiments so we couldn't feel it nor hold them to exactly understand what they felt like, we were just relying on the mental pictures we've created in our minds.

It was also understandable that we couldn't access the equiments because all of them are sterilised and the ones used already are contaminated for us to learn with, so how do we exactly learn?

This kept going on till it was just a week to our exams and the lecturers picked a date for us to come and learn, they brought the whole instruments, more than hundreds of them... In fact, **Surgical Scissors alone were in 16 variants if I'm not even undercounting it.

They just stood at the front of the class and was like, "this is mayo scissors, this is dissecting scissors, here is operating scissors, here is bandage scissors, here is iris scissors here is tenotomy scissors and so on and so forth..."

Like man, how do you expect us to understand all those things just in one sitting and be able to identify them in the exam hall when we see them? Was that how you also learnt them?

At the end of the talking sessions, they said we should come and touch them and see what they looked like which we did just once and that was all.

Guess what? We all knew it was a permanent station in our final exam and we all knew that it's very easy to mix them up because we were just getting properly exposed to them for the first time...
Well, exams came and gone and thank God, for me, I knew I don't need to have 100/100 to become a doctor because I didn't even bother myself at all, I was willing to sacrifice that station for the examiners, lol.

Guess what? Just few months into my Housejob now, I can identify even though not all but 70% of those instruments.

What became different?

Now, I enter the theatre almost everyday and sometimes twice a day, I see those equipments all the time and I touch them... I didn't even read them again, just constant exposure to them was enough.

In summary, sometimes, things aren't as hard as we think, we just need to be properly guided on how to learn them and we will see ourselves know them.

All Pictures Are Mine

Thanks for reading and have a nice day ahead 👍

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