Human Anatomy and Physiology?
I need to take Anatomy and Physiology this Fall semester at college. I am kind of nervous, I have taken a lot of Biology courses in college so far but most of my friends and classmates say that it is one of the hardest courses in the Biology major. Does anyone have some tips or advice on the course or what the format will likely be?
(Visited 3 times, 1 visits today)
To me, the hardest part was anatomy, not physiology. There were hundreds of anatomical terms I had never heard of before … and, if you don’t know the anatomy, you won’t get the physiology.
The way people learn is by associating new information with existing information already in the brain. If you have nothing to "hang" new information onto, then it is an isolated outliar, with no meaning or context, and is not understood well and is quickly forgotten.
So one thing you could try is to go to a library and check out a book, go to a book store and buy a book, or best of all, if you can, buy your course’ text. Then read as much as you can before next semester, but don’t try to actually LEARN all of what you read, just let some of the main things of each chapter "soak in". Maybe jot down 10 important or key facts per chapter and keep reviewing them. Or, if the book has them, read the chapter summaries over and over and LEARN just that material.
That way, when class starts, you should have a good number of basic facts already in place to which you can associate new facts as they come in.
hey i was just trying like an hour ago, to find out if physiology was going to be too hard with all the other courses i’m going to take. i hope someone can answer this then tell me. ha
i just finished taking an a&p course so i’ll tell you about my experience and hopefully it will be helpful to you. the course was formatted so that we learned about one system at a time (integumentary, skeletal, muscular, nervous, endocrine, etc). we averaged about one system a week, so that was one chapter a week from our book that we had to read.
the class was quite a bit of work, just because of the sheer amount of information (some colleges have a&p as a 2 semester class, but my school has it so that we cover all the information in 1 semester). i tried to skim the chapters before we covered them in class, and then again sometime before the test. there is a lot to learn, but as long as you stay on top of the material you should be fine.
come with a cast-iron stomach and a steeled mind.
The physiology class I had required vivisection and experiments on frogs and turtles that were pithed–the nervous system destroyed–but the body still responsive. I had a hard time getting through those labs.
Check with the biology department to see what the requirements are. If you object to what’s in the course (I probably should have), then see how to get around the vivisection. If you are not allowed to bypass it, talk to your campus ombudsman about it.
Vivisection is important in research, but I see no reason to require it of a biologist if that person is not going to concentrate in an area that requires this for research.