Well, I’m about a month into my MSN program and I have to tell you I’m more than a little disheartened. The whole process has so far been very disjointed. Since I’m going into nursing education, the school offered me a service cancellable loan through the Nurse Faculty Loan Program. The problem is that nobody knew how to go about handling the loan. I finally got the money last week, after much prodding and complaining. Nobody seemed to know what was going on, and nobody was taking responsibility. Doesn’t speak well to the school, in my view.

On to classes. I can read the damn PowerPoints; I don’t need to drive an hour each way to have someone do that for me. And I have classmates who drive even further. The concept that we have to sit in a classroom while the instructor reads slides, with little elaboration, is disrespectful of my time and energies. I want to be taught. In the advanced assessment class, it would be nice if we actually did some assessments—or at least got demonstrations of them – rather than simply be told about what we’re supposed to do.

It’s not much different in the other classes. The patho guy pulls crap out of the clear blue to test us on. It’s not a matter of whether we know the material; it’s a game of ‘can I stump them?’ The questions don’t test my familiarity and mastery of the material; they are just a bunch of minutiae he managed to dredge up.

But, I think the thing that irks me the worst, and scares me in many ways, is the lack of instruction that is taking place. As I said, they don’t teach, they read PowerPoints. As a nursing education major, I have to ask whether this is what I will be taught: not how to teach, but how to create PowerPoint slides and read them back to the class. I fear the latter. And we wonder why education isn’t what it used to be.