Kevin Choi
Professor Torgerson
English 1000C
Being a senior, I’ve had my share of good and bad classes. The majority of bad classes were categorized in the Core classes. Coming straight out of high school, the freshmen class will have a predetermined notion that English 1000C will be like any other English class from high school: writing papers on topics that barely catches the attention of the students, reading books that don’t speak to them as writers for the course of 4 years. Who would want to take a class that’s both tedious as well as filled with reading and writing works that are unappealing?
The moment I stepped into this class, I saw my other classmates sitting in their seats looking unenthusiastic as they would in any other mandatory class. Everyone looked eager for the one hour and twenty five minute session to go by so they could proceed to their next class. To be honest, I was feeling the same way. I, too, had a preconceived concept of the class in my mind. I expected at least four or 5 papers. The gloomy mood, however, immediately changed as soon as Professor Torgerson walked in and introduced the structure of the class. By telling us to annotate the syllabus, Professor Torgerson wanted the students to completely understand the end goals for this class. In Learning to Surf the Sea of Conversation: A Way Into Meaningful Research, Professor Torgerson said “I want the writing that my students do in class to change their next Saturday night, their next year, or perhaps even the arc of the rest of their lives” (54).
The weekly blog posts were required so that we, the students, would write about the topic that interests us. The Reading for Writing posts would help us read about said topic and help us learn new things surrounding it. The My Take posts gave us the freedom to write what we wanted to with no bounds. No one would question us on this boundary-free writing. This is one of the lessons I have learned about writing from this course. Writing isn’t something that should be encapsulated. It should be a piece of work that expresses your most inner thoughts. These thoughts may be subjected to criticism, sure, but, learning to write is a form of criticism itself. It reflects our opinions on topics we connect with. We might even be able to learn new things about ourselves through openly writing what is on our mind. If we were limited to areas that hold no interest to us, the work would be poorly written and the ideas would be vaguely expressed.
For the class, we were told to choose a topic that pertains to our interest. Professor Torgerson took the time to personally speak to each student and discuss the possible choices that were in our interest. Instead of writing about cars, something that I have a great passion for but already know a great deal about, he helped me decide to write about transitioning to a nursing major from my pre-medical major. I ended up using these posts to create a small journal for me to jot down information I did not know and for information that I recently discovered related to nursing. From here, I took the next step into looking into the different jobs and fields that a nursing major could take me too. These posts helped me remember why I wanted to do something in the health field in the first place and reignited my passion for it. It’s kind of entertaining as well as refreshing to think about it.
I thought and asked in my first blog post, how often do we look back at our life and ask ourselves, how did we end up where we are today? I am currently a college senior majoring in biology. During the year, my original plan was to take the MCATs and then go to medical school. After medical school I would follow the course that any doctor-in-training would follow and become an intern, then residency, and finally move on to being an attending. This dream seemed crystal clear to me as a high school student and a college freshmen. But as time progressed, I began to realize that this goal that I carried would not be an easy one.
During my upbringing, I was raised on the notion that I should do my best everyday and help anyone whenever I could. This idea was further amplified by my favorite childhood show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. They would fight for good while protecting people from the forces of evil. You could see them helping people stand back up if they fell from a monster’s attack. This spoke to me and helped me establish a goal: Find a job that allows me to help people.
Originally I thought that joining the FBI would fulfill this want. The volunteering experience I had at my local senior center during high school showed me otherwise. I found that helping people without using force was rewarding in its own way. This is when I began to think that becoming a doctor to help people in distress would be something I would enjoy. In college, pre-med majors are told that medical schools require their applicants to have volunteering hours from hospitals as well as an impressively high GPA and MCAT score. In order to fill in the volunteering portion of my application, I began volunteering at North Shore University Hospital’s Emergency Room as an ER Aide.
My GPA, however, was something that wouldn’t even impress my parents. This is where I began to doubt myself. I had a friend a year younger than me who had a pristine 4.0 GPA along with a prestigious scholarship from researching. I also had a few friends who dropped out of the pre-medical major early. I was in a dilemma. I knew that even if I studied everyday for the next two or three years, my dream of going to med school was uncertain. Do I drop everything I’ve worked for until now or do I just continue on this path and accept whatever happens in the future?
The problem kept pestering me like an itch I couldn’t scratch. It would bother me the most while I was volunteering. I would see hundreds of doctors walking around with their interns shadowing their every move. In all honesty I was envious. But then a day arrived where everything started to clear up for me. It seemed like on that day, I was called on to be tested. A car accident that involved 18 people occurred and the ER became overrun. The nurses and doctors needed more hands and the volunteers were called on. On that day, I saw that though doctors have their own set of positive aspects, the nurses, the people who I really didn’t respect enough, were the ones who were helping patients the most. Because the demand for doctors around the hospital was so high, there were only a few in the ER. The nurses were the ones stabilizing the patients and reassuring the family members. I thought that the doctors were the best at doing that but I was way off. That day I realized that maybe my dream to have a job where helping a person was the main objective would be more tangible if I became a registered nurse. In the following My Take blog post, I continued my train of thought for the following week to see if I could scrape up some new ideas.
In my previous post, I wrote about how I was a pre-med biology major that became a regular biology major. Nursing, the new major I want to change over to, is one that isn’t offered at St. John’s. So where do I go from here? I guess the next step would have to be deciding on how I want to spend the next few years and what I want to do with this major in the long run. The major has an Associate’s Degree as well as a Bachelor’s Degree. Do I want become a registered nurse and stop there or do I want to take it one step higher and go for a master’s as well? After looking into the options that lay in front of me, I decided that I would go for the Associate’s. After graduating with that degree, I will apply to New York University College of Nursing’s Graduate Program for Adult Primary Care. Initially I thought of doing something within the pediatrics field but after my experience with children in the ER of North Shore University Hospital, I changed my mind.
A car accident involving 18 cars brought in more than 2 dozen patients midday to the ER. Of the many patients that arrived 4 of them were children. They were crying and screaming for their parents. Glass fragments impaled all four of them and their parents were nowhere in sight. The nurses began working to pull the glass pieces out of their bodies while tending to their bruises and scrapes. I remember the nurses asking me to run around the rooms to find their parents. I remember frantically running to each and every room asking the patients if they had children. The screams of pain that the children were giving off are something that I can really do without.
Now that I’ve chosen a path, what’s my next step? I plan on talking to an advisor over at St. John’s Hall as well as someone at the career center to see what possibilities I have. In the next blog post or two, I’ll be talking about what I found out and what I was advised to do.
Thanks to the RFW posts, I was able to learn that in the healthcare field, Malpractice Lawsuits have been a dramatically rising event and that physicians as well as nurses-in-training are taught that they will most likely be sued at least once in their careers. Who would’ve known?
When we think of hospitals, we automatically visualize a place where the sick and injured go for treatment and not a place where people are getting sued for helping others. The staff at the hospital mostly revolves around the doctors that you find walking up and down the hallways. They have been trained to take care of their patients with the upmost care and respect. The problem is, not everyone sees eye to eye. What would happen if a patient sees an act that a doctor does as something that is very rude to him/her? How do we determine if the quality of their work (from their knowledge to their manners) is up to standards? Today, doctors are sued more than ever for “malpractice”. This term is used when a patient feels that their doctor has been negligent. The law-related parameters of medical practices have become very blurred because of reasons such as greed, pride, wrath etc.
Medical students studying to be future doctors already foresee a day, in the future, where they will be getting sued. “In the past when there was an unfortunate outcome, patients would usually go back to their physicians to see what went wrong. Sometimes they would change physicians; other times they simply accepted the unfortunate outcome as one of life’s vicissitudes… It is, however, becoming increasingly complicated for families to make these decisions. They are bombarded by questions and advice from well-meaning friends and willing plaintiffs’’ attorneys. There are ads in local directories, TV guides, on billboards, and jingles on the radio and television all advocating legal action ‘to promote justice.’”(Leaman, 5)
There are now books out there such as Medical Malpractice: How to Find Out if You Were the Victim of Malpractice and How to Assert Your Legitimate Rights written by Edward J. Smith. In this book, Smith lists numerous examples of what kind of “malpractice” would win you a lawsuit. The foundation of trust between a patient and their physician has become very weak due to the influences found in the media and books such as these.
Many patients forget to realize that physicians must make very difficult decisions on a daily basis. These decisions vary from medical ones to ethical ones. Medical issues can be resolved by consultations with others. An ethical choice made by a doctor, however, could be a root of a disastrous lawsuit. “More often the patient is represented by an attorney who wants to maximize the client’s monetary recovery. Because a large percentage of that recovery goes to the attorney, the amount may be more than the doctor feels should be adequate to compensate.”(Leaman, 214) So how can we fix this problem of malpractice? A quote from Ernest Hemingway is found in the book stating “’I only know that what is moral is what you feel good after. And what is immoral is what you feel bad after.’” (Leaman, 217) Physicians are advised to do what they believe is right only after collecting whatever data is necessary, defining the conflicts of values (theirs and their patients), understanding who makes the decisions, considering the alternatives and making the decision. Then the physician must implement and live with the decision that he/she chose. (Leaman, 222-225)
I was also able to read journals that nurse practitioners read and write about: something I would have probably never found until nursing school. As a former pre-med student, I learned about the makeup of living organisms, the equations that drive chemical processes as well as the mathematical statistics behind physics. What we aren’t taught, however, are the advances happening in the medical field today and how to read and write the papers that publish these works. I assume that professors are leaving that for Medical School professors to teach. The Journal of Advanced Nursing caught my attention. I’ve only read a few doctoral articles so finding an article written entirely by nurse practitioners was like finding a mountain of gold.
The first sentence of the article stated, “Aim. This paper is a report of a study of variations in the pattern of nurse practitioner work in a range of service fields and geographical locations, across direct patient care, indirect patient care and service-related activities,” (Gardner, 2160). By clearly stating the aim of the article, the readers are allowed to understand what the main goal is. That’s a given of course, but there were two things that staggered me. 1) When I quoted the aim, I noticed the page number. It blew me away how many pages in we were. To top it off, this was a Journal of Advanced Nursing that contained 2000+ pages. This means that if I looked around for the actual journal itself, I would have a complete encyclopedia filled with work that nurses are working on as we speak. 2) I found a basis of what I would be looking at and writing about down the line. It was a very informative read and important so I could grab an earlier understanding of what to look forward to.
“Methods. We used work sampling methods. Data were collected between July 2008 and January 2009. Observations were recorded from a random sample of 30 nurse practitioners at 10-minute intervals in 2-hour blocks randomly generated to cover 2 weeks of work time from a sampling frame of 6 weeks” (Gardner, 2160). I had to read this section about a good 12 times to fully grasp what it was trying to say. After understanding it, it was really interesting to see how nurse practitioners would go about looking for means to better their services. After all, the main goal of a nurse practitioner is to care after a patient’s condition as well as how the illness affects the patient and their family. By better understanding where their time gets spent during randomly selected intervals during any day would allow the NP’s to orientate their time in a better manor and in turn, allow the patient to receive better health care. By being able to read such informative works as well as being able to look back I can proudly say that these posts were extremely beneficial for me.
“Writing floats on a sea of conversation”: the second lesson I learned from this class. When I first heard the quote, I immediately thought to myself, “What?” This confused mentality gradually began to work itself out as the class progressed. In Writing Without Teachers, Peter Elbow states his belief that a class made up of diverse students would be more beneficial than a regular class. “Perhaps you are even taking a writing course and a teacher tells you what he thinks the weak and strong points were and suggests things you should try for. But you usually get little sense of what the words actually did to him- how he perceived and experienced them. Besides, he’s only one person and not very typical of other readers either” (77).
Like the quote “writing floats on a sea of conversation”, conversing with the fellow writers of the class lets us hear firsthand what they think of our writing. This can help broaden our train of thought. By speaking about the many topics that we write about, we may develop new ways to look at the world. These newly developed perceptions may help us fortify our writing or even change who we are. I was paired up with Wesley and Jeremy. They gave me the initial idea that I should look outwards for more incite in the medical field. This happened to go hand-in-hand with the event that took place while I was waiting for the career center meeting.
In my last blog post, I said that for the next few weeks, I would be writing about what I’m told by advisers, counselors, and workers at the career center. My first attempt on Thursday was very unsuccessful. All of the advisers were out and I completely forgot about going to the career center. After that failed attempt, I trekked it over to the career center on today. I was told to wait about 30 minutes. While I was there I overheard a few students talking about their resumes. I couldn’t help but here one of them talking about being a pre-med major. She was telling her friend her plan on how she’s preparing to take the MCATs next year as well as do activities that would look good on her application. She then told her friend about her recent International Service Learning (ISL) trip. She went to Nicaragua to learn from full- fledged doctors on how to treat patients as well as diagnosing. I was curious so I immediately pulled out my phone to Google ISL.
On their website www.islonline.org, visitors immediately see “International Health Teams: Get hands- on experience in: Medical, Nursing….” I was astonished when I saw the word. I looked further on their program listings. The nursing program was EXTREMELY thorough. It details the medical activities that the applicants can partake in such as triaging, observing labor and delivery duties, assisting with vaccinations, to even observing surgeries. And to add on to these activities, the program can range from as little as 9 days to 21 days. I thought to myself that this is something I should definitely ask the career center advisers about. So after the 30 minutes of intense reading, they told me if I could come back on Monday. I didn’t regret waiting though. I’ve set my appointment for Monday so during the weekend I’ve decided do a little thinking. I’ve been contemplating taking a semester off before starting up my new school I apply for. Maybe if I did, I could attend a trip while continuing my volunteering schedule at North Shore University Hospital. Along with this, I should try to make a schedule/checklist to break down what I need to do and look into.
This idea of “expanding the borders of my mind” was something that stuck with me throughout the semester. When it came time to do our group project, Wesley, Jeremy and I grouped up to share our interest in broadened horizons. We came up with the idea that traveling should be the revolving theme of this project. The project itself seemed like a fairly easy task but boy was I WAY off. We met up on Saturday morning at 9:00A.M thinking we would be done within a few hours. We decided that before meeting, we would research a little into our own individual portions of the topic we chose. It was great to work together with the guys because we all agreed that our topic was definitely something that people should consider doing more. As we, the devotees, began the project, we realized that Movie Maker wasn’t going to be friendly as we thought. This is where Wesley swooped down to rescue us. Being fairly familiar with the program, Wesley decided to take charge of the project and began looking for pictures, videos and music that we could incorporate into our presentation. Jeremy and I organized the information that we gathered and sorted who would speak first. Everything seemed alright after 2 hours of confusion.
After a few minutes, we decided that recording the audio should take priority. As we began to regurgitate our information, we realized that it was going to be harder than we thought. With people opening the doors, belching, as well as the sound of a straw interrupting us during recording, we couldn’t help but lose focus. The last issue was our dear Wesley accidentally erasing all of our work when everything was beautifully set up but luckily for all of us, we each had copies of the project. Overall I thought this was a great project. Our mishaps made us lose track of time and enjoy making the presentation. There were a lot of laughs as well as a lot of things that the three of us learned about ourselves, our locations and life. Overall, I would love to be able to do something like this again. It goes to show that the conversations we have with other readers can take open our minds to even bigger ideas and pictures. In fact, we have learned that traveling is necessary for creativity as well as for your mind to expand.
There is a third lesson that I have learned which follows both Elbow and Professor Torgerson’s teachings. If we are to write deeply and boundary-free, we shouldn’t subjugate ourselves to the laws of grammar. We must, as Donald Murray will state, unlearn to write. In Write to Learn, Murray explains the current writing system is filled with teachers who are readers but not writers themselves. He stresses the idea that writing should be boundary-free as well. “Writing is an experimental science. There are no rights and wrongs in writing. You can be absolutely correct and write badly, or you can write well, but not be correct according to the rules” (16). By reading this sentence alone, I began to break small rules such as never starting a sentence with “because,” and never having more than one “and” in one sentence. After making a piece of work unlawful, the message was more visible than it was before. Another point that Murray was trying to get across was idea that perfect grammar doesn’t necessarily lead to good writing. Many of the books we read may consist of poor grammar but tells an amazing story. Wouldn’t you say that it’s refreshing to read something that isn’t grammatically correct in every way?
The class has helped reinvigorate reading and writing as a whole for me. It made me realize that writing isn’t only what you find in books and journals but something that surrounds us 24/7. We read and write more than we notice. Every text message we receive and reply to is considered reading and writing. We’re exposed to pop-ups online that we may or may not read. Some movies have segments where the protagonist reads a letter or email as the audience reads along. Clothing has words clearly written on it to grab the reader’s attention. If it weren’t for this class, I would have never noticed this world of reading and writing that surrounds us on a constant basis.
One thing that I struggled with was deciding on going for a Baccalaureate Degree or an Associate’s for nursing. It is still something that I’m debating and hoping to settle before the end of the semester. Another struggle I faced was finding one article per week that related with nursing. It was easy at first thanks to EBSCO as well as the library but after using up these resources, I had to look a little harder to find eligible reading material. By Google-ing a random bunches of words like “nursing” and “in the past” along with words like “healthcare” and “medicine”, I was able to find a few extra articles to fill my RFW quota. For example, I found an article about Nurse Practioners in 1987.
I was a little curious to see how Nurse Practitioners operated back in the past so I did some digging. Rather than reading an article that detailed their practices and goals, I found a New York Times article from 1987 that spoke about the possibility of Nurse Practitioners losing their jobs in the New York State. According to the article, the Medical Society of the State of New York was against nurse practitioner legislation. There were disputes on whether or not NP’s should be barred from their working duties in the state. As a response NP’s created a new bill stating that they would be able to diagnose illnesses as well as prescribe medication while working with a physician. But rather than accepting the bill, it was rejected due to“…heavy pressure by the doctors’ and nurses’ associations in the state.”
“Proponents of the legislation argue that nurse practitioners could – and in many states do – provide a useful alternative to physicians in treating common illnesses and offering preventive care. Most importantly, they say, nurse practitioners are more likely than doctors to establish practices in underserved rural and inner-city areas.”
Though many people acknowledged the need for NP’s in the healthcare field at the time, the notion that nurses with Masters Degrees would be responsible for the work that doctors completed bothered many people. It goes to show how “wide” the viewpoint was back then. Though they were prohibited from doing so, many NP’s continued to diagnose and treat patients illegally. Elaine Gelman, the president-elect of the nurse practitioner coalition of 1987, stated that 44 states acknowledged the legislation that NP’s should be entitled to their expanded roles in the health field. She continued onto saying that if New York would not provide acknowledgement, the younger generation of NP’s would leave the state and leave New York with little to no NP’s to provide acute care to their patients. An interesting fact is that NP’s, at the time, were all referred to as females.
I can proudly say that this English class has helped me become a better reader, writer and a person who knows what he wants out of life. Because of the blog posts, I was able organize all of the turbulent thoughts that drifted in my head into my blog posts. I continued by deciding what was important for my future as well as the steps I should take by comparing all of the different roads that lay ahead of me. Thanks to the class, I was able to find out about the ISL Program; a program which will definitely help my medical career in the future. By traveling on the ISL program, I hope to come back with a whole new set of ideas and viewpoints. The group project helped open my eyes to how vast the world is and what it has to offer. I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t have stumbled across all of the things I did without the initial nudge that the class provided for me so thank you readers and Professor Torg for bearing with me in this long but priceless experience. I know that if and when I need to organize my train of thought in the future, writing will definitely be an important tool to help me.
Table of Contents:
1) My Take 1: Page 2
2) My Take 2: Page 4
3) My Take 3: Page 9
4) My Take 7: Page 10
5) Reading For Writing 2: Page 5
6) Reading For Writing 6: Page 7
7) Reading For Writing 9: Page 12
Works Cited/Works Consulted
Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.: 77. Print
Gardner, G., Gardner, A., Middleton, S., Della, P., Kain, V. and Doubrovsky, A. (2010), The work of nurse practitioners. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 66: 2160–2169. doi: 10.1111/j.1365- 2648.2010.05379.x.
Kolbert, Elizabeth. “NEW YORK NURSE PRACTITIONERS WONDER ABOUT FUTURE AFTER A DEFEAT – New York Times.” The New York Times – Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. 26 July 1987. Web. 1 Dec. 2011. <http://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/26/nyregion/new-york-nurse-practitioners-wonder- about-future-after-a-defeat.html?scp=8>.
Leaman, Aslib homas L., and James W. Saxton.Preventing Malpractice, The Co-active Solution. Plenum Pub Corp, 1993. <http://books.google.com/books/feeds/volumes?q=0-306- 44441-0>.
Murray, Donald. Write to Learn. 7th ed. Canada: Heinle, 2002.: 16. Print
Torgerson, William. “Learning to Surf the Sea of Conversation: A Way Into Meaningful Research.”Journal of Teaching Writing. 26.2. (2011): 54. Print.
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