Winter Quarter 2 Courses: Conditions
Many of my classmates absolutely hated this class and thought it was a waste of time. That's a terrible opening line, but I'll explain.
At the beginning of the quarter, the professor had us look at lecture powerpoints that had recorded audio prior to coming to class. In class, we had guest speaks that had various conditions, each week a group of classmates presented on a different condition, and then we would spend an hour looking up conditions. The justification for this was that the professor wanted us to be able to look up unfamiliar conditions when we're on fieldwork and in our future careers as OTs. But she wanted us to only use peer reviewed sources (meaning journal articles and government websites), not just google the condition and get a basic idea of what it is. This was rather laughable because nearly the entire class are millennials, we grew up with the Internet and we know how to use it. Not to mention that we also are graduate students, meaning we completed undergraduate degrees that required us to search for peer reviewed articles at so point, meaning that all of us know how to use google and all of us know how to search a library database.
After receiving many complaints, the course changed slightly. We continued to have guest speakers with various conditions. Which I personally, found interesting and a nice change of pace since we're trapped in the same classroom for six to eight hours a day (most of which is mindless and boring hours wasted). We also continued to have our group presentations. The professor started to lecture a for 30 to 45 minutes, however, her version of lecturing is having powerpoint slides that basically just list off conditions, and then she'll talk about some characteristics of them. The worst part is she doesn't really know what some of the conditions are or she mixes them up, so I personally was doing readings, finding extra sources and making my own summary sheets of each condition (even if it was only listed and not discussed at all).
The irony is, the point of this class was to give us the skills to look up unfamiliar conditions and have enough of an understanding that we would be able to come up with how to evaluate and treat a client (which we have not learned how to evaluate or treat anyone thus far in OT school). However, by spending so much time on this skill, that we didn't actually spend time learning about the most common conditions treated by OTs, unless you're like me an took personal responsibility for your own education. Which I did by completing the assigned readings, looking through the textbooks for additional chapters that discuss conditions, and looking up articles about each condition so that I could synthesize all this information into summary sheets on each condition.
Atchison, B. & Dirette, D. (2017). Conditions in occupational therapy: Effect on occupational performance (5th ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Wolters Kluwer.
Radomski, M. & Trombly Latham, C. (Eds.). (2014). Occupational therapy for physical dysfunction. (7th ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
