A Good Medical Course Can Also Absorb You Completely

Listening to lectures at school, it is basically impossible to fully understand and master everything. I am in a vocational (associate-degree) program rather than a bachelor's program, so overall the teaching quality is not high. With so many professional medical-theory courses to compress into two years, the curriculum is bound to be tight and the teachers lecture at high speed. One major system of the human body can be covered by our teachers in a single class. After class I do not know how the other students are doing; I myself am in a state of half-understanding.

For an adult, if what we learn is only half-understood, it feels very uncomfortable. To master things thoroughly, one has to seek out online course resources oneself and listen to other teachers' open video lectures. I like to look for courses on Bilibili; starting from the first week of school I found many online resources, such as Histology and Embryology taught by Professor Ma Baohua of Shandong University, Systematic Anatomy taught by Professor Huo Kun of China Medical University, and Physiology taught by Professor Luo Ziqiang of Central South University's medical school.

These professors teach at a very high level; their lectures are deep yet accessible and truly let one learn a great deal while inspiring our thinking. In the past, if you had not been admitted to their schools, it would have been impossible to hear such excellent courses. But in the internet age their teaching videos have all become free open courses, from which many of us, myself included, have benefited greatly. So in today's era, if a person is very interested in a field of learning, they can basically master it well by taking online courses.

Of course, for a highly practical discipline like medicine, many resources of school-based education cannot be found online. For example, our lab and practical-training resources are unique. The cadavers (body donors) needed for medical labs, if observed on one's own outside a medical school lab, could easily run afoul of criminal law. And few people have the nerve to dissect a corpse alone. Each lab room at our school has several cadavers and specimens of human organs; without other classmates accompanying me, I would not dare stay alone in the lab.

At the start of school I was overwhelmed by the pile of non-major courses on the timetable. As everyone knows, Chinese higher education has many required courses that everyone dislikes and that have almost nothing to do with the major; students habitually call them "water courses." After attending classes for a while, I became quite satisfied with this arrangement. Because these courses let us catch our breath; we can use the hours of these "water courses" to make up for major subjects. If all class hours were devoted to the major, it would truly be too much to bear.

Perhaps our major-subject teachers' knowledge is also quite limited. During lab classes I often ask questions, and the teaching assistants answer enthusiastically. In the first few lab classes, their answers were fairly reliable. In later lab classes, the teaching assistants' answers became a bit unreliable. After class I look things up and often find the teacher's answer completely wrong.

But this is understandable: medicine is too complex, and every branch is enough for a person to study for a lifetime. Anyone studying medicine learns only a very limited body of professional knowledge. If I became a teacher and met a student as curious and as rich in life experience as me, I probably could not answer many of the questions he raised either.

If a teacher, while lecturing, can spark many intellectual sparks in a student, that is already remarkable. So I still very much like and appreciate our school's lab instructor. If he had not explained so much to us beside the specimens, I would not have generated so many questions, and thus could not have gone further to learn and understand more. I do not know whether, when he taught me, he felt it was interesting or stressful; I hope he found it interesting. After all, if all the students facing a teacher are silent, the teacher can hardly feel the joy of teaching in class; if it were me, I would feel lonely.

Lab classes can inspire more of my thinking. When the teacher pointed to the esophagus and trachea and told us they share a wall, my habitual reaction was to raise this question: since the adjacency of these two organs is so close, do diseases of the esophagus and trachea affect each other? When the teacher had us swallow to feel the esophagus at work, I immediately wondered: the muscle of the middle and lower esophagus seems not under brain control, not skeletal (voluntary) muscle—so how is food propelled into the stomach in the middle and lower esophagus?

Our textbooks give no answer to this kind of knowledge; it would of course be better if the teacher could resolve our doubts on the spot. If the teacher cannot, then by my disposition I will most likely look up various materials and study it thoroughly. Such ideas can only spring up in the process of teacher-student interaction; they do not arise easily from thinking alone, after all, none of us is a genius like Newton. I ask the teacher such questions in the lab; sometimes the teacher can resolve them and sometimes not. When not, I go on to look up teaching videos on the topic. Learning this way is a very enjoyable thing.

Once I entered this state of study, outside influences on us became negligible. I have many friends in various trades outside school; many may be anxious about the current economic situation. Occasionally they send me information or article links on this, but I feel these have nothing to do with me anymore.

At my age studying at school, the difference from my schoolmates is written all over my face, and many people are curious about me. Even the cafeteria worker who serves my food cannot help asking who I am. When I study in the library, I am now often accosted by students from other classes; they have already heard that there is an "uncle-aged" freshman at the school, and at every opportunity they curiously ask about me.

At first this also made me uncomfortable, but now I do not mind. Most of the time I just respond politely and then go back to burying myself in my work. When a person enters a vast spiritual world and enjoys everything in it, the outside world barely exists for him.