Enthusiasm! For a few of you who have been checking this blog since near its beginning, you might remember that I once had a new word: proactive. Not that I had never heard that word before, it was just something that I didn't use much in most conversations. The same for my "new" word now: Enthusiasm! It's not a word that was previously absent from my vocabulary; it's just that I haven't used it to describe much of anything.
Why is enthusiasm my new word? Because it is what I need a lot of right now. Gobs of it! I'm severely lacking in the enthusiasm department. There is very little that enthuses me anymore, and I'm regressively becoming less enthusiastic about college. Do I still want to be a nurse? Yes, definitely! In 5+ years, my goal of becoming a flight nurse has not changed, but I'm finding out that the process of getting there is not what I thought it would be. There are many factors that are contributing to all this lack of enthusiasm, and I admit that not all of them are necessarily external, but I do have to admit that one of the major factors is that nursing school is not quite turning out to be what I had expected. I know, you might be thinking something like, "Well, it takes a lot of hard work, and persistence, and a lot of study, and.....and......and.....blah blah blah." No kidding. That is no news to me. When I say I had different expectations, I didn't mean that I expected college to be easier. In some ways, I had higher expectations, and now that those are not being met, I have to admit it's rather disgusting, especially when you consider the price of a college degree these days. I could rant and rave to no avail about it, but the point is, when I get out of college, I'll be glad it's over so I can get out into the real world again like I was before, and start to learn again in my own way, and get on with life. Nursing school is lacking in some domains of a good learning environment because they seem so focused on getting us to make it look good on paper, i.e. passing written tests, and writing papers according to perfect format from the notions of such hoity-toity organizations like APA, ANA, HIPAA, JCAHO, NANDA-I, and so on. Those things are all fine and dandy, and they have their rightful places. I don't mean to undermine all the well-intended values and little details of some of those organizations, but we are missing some of the bigger picture here. I've studied a little about education, even though it's not my major, and it's pretty obvious without going into a lot of detail that we are missing out on some things. In my opinion, a good learning environment fully utilizes all the components of Bloom's Taxonomy: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. To see more about Bloom's Taxonomy, do a google search on it. The three domains are further broken down into levels, which I won't get into right now. Some of the aspects of those levels are missing in college, and I find that extremely frustrating at this point.
The point is, I've seen Bloom's Taxonomy applied in other learning environments, and if it is done right, it is very efficient and produces excellent students who have been prepared to perform in whatever environment it is that they were trained to be in. That teaching style is what they used when I went to EMT school, and even though the content of what we were taught was classified as basic technical skills, it was well delivered. It's not the content but the delivery method that I'm talking about. When we came out of EMT school, we were very well prepared to be entry level EMT's. I'm worried that I will not come away from college prepared to be an entry level RN. They determine who is an RN by their GPA and if they pass a written test: NCLEX. That is part of the reason I add some of my own clinical by working at LVH. I can also see that other students are going to be in for a big surprise when they get pushed out into the real world, especially the ones who see this coming summer as their last chance before graduation to get out and party one last time before they have to start paying their college debts off. All I can say to them, is "good luck!"
OK, enough sarcasm. I need more Enthusiasm! Anybody have some Enthusiasm! "pills" for me?
