I've arrived.

Welcome to my blog. I have been thinking about doing this for a long time; what better way to debrief after a long day of clinical? Especially when I have had the opportunity to remove the briefs of several patients. Mmmm...

So today I want to rant about the whole nursing school model. I'm in semester three of a four semester program, and to date I have experienced five different nursing instructors. So far I have learned from one of them. Crazy, huh? And I believe the reason for my lack of learning is a fundamental flaw in the way nurses educate students.

In my mind, we are all in school for a reason: to learn. If I already knew how to be a nurse, I wouldn't need to be in school at all! In fact, if I knew how to be a nurse - I could be the one teaching the class, in which case I'd be doing it a lot differently. In nursing school, there's an emphasis on finding out what you don't know... meaning, the nursing instructor is constantly trying to "catch" you doing something stupid so she can yell at you in front of your classmates, the nurses on the floor, or worse yet, your patient. The result is that you instinctively hide from your instructor, hide your lack of knowledge, and don't learn a thing! Why is the emphasis not placed on what we do know, so that we can build upon the skills that we have in order to expand our role as nurses? Which is worse, progressing through a semester without learning a skill you should have learned, or progressing through the next semester as well because you were afraid to admit that you were in the dark about something? Why can't we, as students, be up front about the fact that we are inexperienced?

Somewhere along the line, nursing instructors made the assumption that students who were inexperienced or uncomfortable with a new skill were incompetent. Their response was to browbeat these poor students into submission, demanding that they put forth only a picture of complete knowledge and skill. We students have been happy to oblige, as we quickly learned that silence is better than question, and "going along" is virtually painless when compared with requesting an explanation.

But I really do want to learn. And I really don't want to graduate unprepared. If I had it to do all over again, I would ask 99 questions a day in my first semester, when we were still allowed to be clueless. Too late for that now...