So I got this nice email today…

"Liu, Joshua Paul

You achieved the following scores on the STF exams:

Blood & Gross Anatomy average: 84.3%, Your mark: 74.7
Histology average: 85.0%, Your mark: 67.5
Embryology average: 76.49%, Your mark: 70"

Boy, that Histology mark looks ugly. I will be super sad if I’m asked to do remediation for that. I’m not sure what happened – I wasn’t completely prepared, but I thought that part of the exam went okay. Guess you never really know…

Anyways, I wanted to sort of clarify my whole rant in my last post. Yes, admittedly, it was a rant.

Let’s be clear – my brother, Jerome, was in medical school here at UofT last year. So yes, I knew exactly what I was getting myself into – I knew that first year would be full of rote memorization, and that I was probably going to go insane. That being said, I didn’t really think about it. It’s one of those things where you’re like, “naw, I’ll just let future Josh deal with that problem”.

I do understand most of this knowledge is important and necessary for the development of my medical career – it’s just frustrating when it seems like the rewards that you reap from enduring the frustrating parts seem so far away. Constant memorization does not interest me, and my personality type is one where I get bored/frustrated when I can’t pursue something I’m deeply interested in and passionate about.

It also does worry me that I’m finding it hard to have the motivation to do anything but “just pass”. What does it all mean, and why am I doing it? It’s a good question, and I’m sure the answer will be complicated. I think it’s partly because of my dislike for memorization, that I naturally figure out the least I need to study to just pass.

So in short, yes, I get that I need to know this information – yes, I do need to just suck it up and get over it.

That being said, I do think developing critical thinking skills is one of those things that our education system constantly claims to do but doesn’t. They test them, but almost never help develop them, and if they do, it’s usually in pretty minute ways. What I mean by this is that exam questions often require critical thinking skills, but no one spends the time to help students (that are lacking them) develop those skills.

You don’t develop critical thinking skills by simply listening or learning the mechanics for tackling a common problem. You develop critical thinking skills by asking questions and trying to answer them. You develop critical thinking skills by discussing concepts with peers, challenging their ideas and having yours challenged, and together learning different ways to approach problems. That is, you learn how to think about the knowledge you’re taught.

All the time in school they say understanding is more important than memorization. I don’t think they take it far enough. More important than both understanding and memorization is knowing how to think about that knowledge.

I’m sure I’ve used this example before in another post, I want to bring it up again to clarify what I mean by this and why it’s so important.

Have you ever been stuck on a problem, so you go to a peer, tutor, or professor for help? They figure out the answer and explain it to you – and you understand how they got the answer perfectly. But, you still can’t do the next question on your own – why is that?

It’s clearly not a problem with understanding – you obviously understand the material well enough to understand solutions presented to you. The problem is that you don’t know how to think about the material yet – that is, you are struggling with the ability to think critically about the material on your own. This is what happens when you feel like you’ve studied the material and understand the answers to all the homework, and yet still seem to mess up on the exam.

I firmly believe that we need to invest the time and resources to help students learn how to think about the material they are being taught. It’s not enough that they “understand” the material, because understanding does not necessarily lead to critical thinking. We need to make that jump possible.

Joshua Liu
MD Candidate
University of Toronto 2013