Post Conference Blues

Last week I attended a conference here. The subject was medical education. It was an interesting and suprisingly well organised event with several international speakers and myself. I gave a presentation describing my novel teaching methodology.

My presentation went as follows:
First I described the problem, as in any scientific study, as I am first and foremost a scientist.
The problem is as I have described in this very own blog. Students for the most part don't understand any English, and they don't seem to have any background knowledge in science. They are seemingly unable to apply what little knowledge they have and are only adept at memorisation.
The type of memorisation practiced here is bizarre to say the least.

I can offer an example. A lecturer will give them three pages of notes and instruct the student to "learn" this information. The notes will consist of a series of statements

An example of such statements is as such: "Physostigmine is a competitive inhibitor of the enzyme, Acetyl Cholinesterase". Carbachol is an agonist of the Acetyl Choline Receptor.

The examination will then include a multiple choice question as follows:
Which of the following is correct?
a. Physostigmine is an agonist of the Acetyl Choline Receptor
b. Carbachol is a competitive inhibitor of the enzyme, Acetyl Cholinesterase
c. Physostigmine is a competitive inhibitor of the enzyme, Acetyl Cholinesterase
d. Carbachol is a competitive inhibitor of the the Acetyl Choline receptor.

It is plain that the object of this exercise is not to promote an understanding of the subject at hand, but to test the student on their ability to memorise a sequence of words.

The students are happy enough at this method, they frequently receive excellent marks, on the level of 90% receive an A grade, 5% A- and 5% B+

This becomes a more complex issue, of course when we recall, that these are MEDICAL students, whom armed with this knowledge or should we say, lack of knowledge, will be practising a medical doctors at a hospital near you :)

Actually, in reality many of the students don't even expect to be doing this. Their aim is not the hard work of a medical physicians career.

They already have a plan, that their position will be fast track, as all Saudi citizens seem to be granted, super fast track promotion to the position of Mudir (director).

The way to become a director is as follows, post medical degree, the newly qualified , and world class one must add, doctor will be sent abroad, to the UK for instance, for a special course, such as training in Surgery etc etc. These courses are only open to citizens of foreign countries and
not to natives of the UK. I expect that you might get the picture.

The newly qualified "surgeon" etc will return to Arabia, and behold, they are now the new director of the department of Surgery. There are of course lots of Egyptians doing the actual donkey work under him.

The director has the unenviable task of spending their days, when they decide to actually go to their plush office, most beautifully decorated, signing various authorisation papers for this and that and taking home a bumper salary every month.

I must state however, that THIS IS A MINORITY OF STUDENTS' ASPIRATIONS, yet unfortunately not a small minority.

There are some good people here, I must state that also. But unfortunately nowadays few who are sincere and almost none whom are brave.

Anyway, back to the conference. After describing the problem to my audience, I then went on to describe the solution. My solution is to use lots and lots of animations of core principles and test their knowledge by giving many tests on the application of this knowledge.

It Works! I described how it does in this presentation.

However, the moderator throughout the presentation seemed unnaturally aggressive and just plain nasty. I received only one question afterward, which was pretty much a throwaway sort of thing. It seemed to not really receive the response that I had expected.

It was revealed to me at the tea break following this, that I had made in my presentation, an enormous faux-pas. I had actually mentioned a problem, or in fact a series of them. Despite that I had worked extremely hard to find and implement the solution, day and night in fact was irrelevant. I had committed such a terrible sin, in revealing that the students here are not quite good enough, to say the least. This is the custom of the people here, to sweep all problems under the carpet and there you have it; BLISS!