Eating the Elephant
“I just can’t do this. It’s too much information!” If I had a dime for every time I have heard a student say something like this, I would be a very wealthy man. I have been teaching for over 20 years and I fully understand how overwhelming learning anatomy, physiology and pathophysiology can be. I went through the same journey as a student in my bachelor’s program and in my doctoral program. So please understand, I feel your pain.
There is a silly question that I have always asked my students on the first day of class. What is the easiest way to eat an elephant? That question has always received strange looks and often a few chuckles. The answer is…one bite at a time. There is another saying that comes from an ancient Chinese proverb that may be more familiar to you, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” I prefer the sillier one regarding the elephant but regardless, they both share the same simple truth. For any task that first appears to be overwhelming the thing to focus on is the first step or the first bite. If you focus on each individual bite, eventually you will eat the entire elephant.
If you think about learning the muscles, this can be an overwhelming task. It is the elephant. There are over 300 individual muscles in the human body. If you think about learning all of their names, locations, origins, insertions and actions, you are looking at over 1,500 individual pieces of information. However, if you focus on learning just one bite (one piece of information), chewing up that one bite thoroughly and letting it digest before moving on to the next bite, you will not only (eventually) eat the entire elephant, you will also wind up learning the information on a deeper level.
As one example of this idea, the first bite I tell students that they need to take regarding learning the muscles is to first learn the names of the bones of the skeleton thoroughly. You may ask what this has to do with learning the muscles and the answer is that the bones (especially the landmarks) are the points of origin and insertion for all of the skeletal muscles in the body. If you do not understand the bones of the skeleton well first, you will never understand the origins and insertions of the muscles.
For all of your topics on your journey to prepare yourself to take the MBLEx, and more importantly, in becoming the best therapist you can be, regard every topic, every subject, as simply one bite. Take each bite, chew it up thoroughly and let it fully digest before moving on to the next bite. I promise you will devour that elephant overtime and the result will be a more complete understanding of the material you are studying.