This is the beginning of my sophomore year course review- the first class on the first day, and probably as easy as classes will get in my sophomore year. I’m writing this less than a week after trimester 1 ended, and overall I’d say this is as easy as the Tri gets, which is to say, not very easy at all.
So my friends who are reading this blog probably have the question of why I even took this course. And to them I say… I don’t know. I honestly just took it because I don’t know where I want to go in the future, but it sort of just left me with more questions than I started with. This was an interesting event for sure.
The first thought that came to my mind after entering the classroom was: Too many freshmen. I was entirely aware that there would be freshmen – this was primarily a freshman class, after all, but… this many freshmen certainly was beyond my expectations. I recognized only a few sophomores like myself- maybe around five or six in the whole class. I knew only a limited number of people- I knew about zero of the freshmen and like, three sophomores at most. I didn’t feel my best in this class, but… whatever. I’m sure it’s all going to be entirely okay.
The course was quite interesting- the first few days were spent discussing teamwork skills and work ethic, as well as this thing called Bloom’s Taxonomy, which is a hierarchy that ranks that way you think. It wasn’t related to medical stuff in the slightest, but I think it was certainly important because it was just the first few days of high school for the freshmen, and many of us needed something like this to start out our high school careers. It wasn’t until almost a week into the school year that we started the material, and oh boy, it’s a lot. I will only be able to skim over it, otherwise this article would be longer than the entire VN2023 series combined.
We started out the class with a very exciting case! There’s been a murder, and we have to figure out who did it- the murder victim was a 20 year old girl named Anna Garcia, and there are five possible suspects who might be responsible. The first was her boyfriend, a guy named Eric Piedmont who got into a fight with her the day before she died. The second suspect is Taylor Diaz, a guy who reported Anna Garcia’s body to the authorities. Dominique Hall is the name of the third victim, and she was a competitive classmate of Anna Garcia’s. The fourth suspect was her teacher and the fifth suspect was a girl named Sam who was in a fight with Anna because of a collision they had during soccer practice.
So who ended up being the killer?
When I first was introduced to the suspects, I thought maybe it would be the Eric Piedmont guy. For some reason it’s just always the boyfriend who’s the killer (I have no idea where I got that kind of thinking from, but everyone said that) and a lot of the experiments we did usually ended up pointing to him.
Well, after learning and experimenting with blood, hair, DNA, and performing numerous autopsies and analyses of the evidence given in class…
None of them. Kind of disappointing, but none of them were guilty for the murder, which was sad since a lot of them had decent (reasons that kind of make sense) reasons to kill Anna. As it turns out, the collision between Sam and Anna during the soccer practice ended up giving her a concussion and a migraine. To treat this, she ended up taking pills and collapsed several hours after the collision because of a bad reaction to the pills. That was kind of sad, because there could’ve been some crazy lore that went along with anna’s murder.
Most of the material in this class was learned through just a few methods- labs, reading, and worksheets. At the beginning of the course, we were given a huge worksheet from which we answered questions about the material, took notes (there were a lot of notes) and made resources. It was crucial to have these notes, because many of the quizzes we took for the class actually allowed open notes. This was a blessing for me, since I rarely spent any time trying to memorize stuff in that class. I almost always used the notes as resources for my tests, particularly for topics my understanding wasn’t deep in. We also learned a lot of things through the labs which helped us absorb a lot of the material.
Crazy enough, labs were actually far more fast-paced than AP Chemistry, although it should be noted that they were a lot easier. Generally labs in this class were easy to set up and understand, although at times they were a little too fast and difficult to remember. We had to do several things including figuring out blood types and even dissecting a sheep’s heart (I am never doing that again). The sheep heart in my opinion was the most memorable because it took the longest and was easily the grossest thing I’ve ever done in my life. It took ages to get past the grossness, and I’m glad I don’t have a strong sense of smell, because all of my friends who can smell really well were talking about it like it was torture. Ignoring the grossness was important, however, because we had to finish and fill out numerous worksheets identifying where each part of the heart, the blood flow, and we also measured the size of some of the chambers in the heart.
Overall, what do I think of this class?
I can certainly see why people would want to take Principles of Biomed. It’s interesting, has a lot of material, and it’s useful if you’re looking to get into the medical field. They have a lot of resources to make it a very immersive experience, and you’ll learn a lot about the human body. Definitely take it (But go onto the next course level in the health field if you’re a sophomore like me, Human Body Systems)