Seredipity

Tonight, well now today (its 12:03am), a profound serendipitous evening was bestowed upon me. I was dissecting the face and deep neck of my cadaver, carefully teasing out the white tensile nerve fibers, superficial veins, and mimicry muscles from the connecting fascia to expose the required nerves, veins and muscles. This nice, courteous, young woman, with narrow black rimmed glasses and frizzily tended brown hair was helping me with the names, functions, and innnervations of the arteries, veins, muscles and nerves of my cadavers face. She was extremely knowledgeable about all the required structures; so much so that I asked her if she was a T.A. (Teachers Assistant). She smiled with a glow to her face but just smirked and stated that she had just read a lot before she came to dissect her cadaver that evening.
At about 11:00pm everyone had gone home for the evening and we were the only two living beings left in the cold white, formalin fragranced room. Our small talk had turned to an incident that had happend earlier that day about some student with a very high grade having come to the professors and complain about extra credit being givien on the tests because that washed out the true curve.
Can you believe it, a student with a high score complaining about getting more points and giving themselves a higher grade? The only thing I see in that is someone who is very competitive and would like to see more people do poorly to make themself look better. That's an ASSHOLE if I ever heard of one.
I had relayed to her that I had spoken with the professors about that incident and apparently it was true that some student did come in and complain about that and the professor was now seriously considering doing away withthat I thought it would not be appropriate to take away the points on the test, for that would hurt all of the latter quarter percentile of students the most and that I considered it unfair to take away something that had already been started. I had also made the argument to the professor that he didn't know if someone that got the lowest score on the test had a learning disability or they had a bad day or what and to take away an extra point system after it had already been implemented would discourage those people even more.
An interesting point: if the extra credit points were taken away the class test average would have been 66% and over one third of the class would have failed.
Well I explained to the woman, her name is Brett, that I had had someone earlier in the day accuse me of doing that and that I got pretty pissed off about the accusation. So I explained to her that I got the highest score on the test. She was very congragulatory, but as was talked she revealed to me she got the lowest score on the test a 35%. I was shocked, how could it be that this knowledgeable, seemingly intelligent woman who had been so helpful and informative got the lowest grade? I tole her that I felt very bad for her and then asked if she had Dyslexia. She did. And she did just a poorly in her biochemistry exam--the lowest score. I felt bad for her. But I told her that she had one of the best personalities I had met and that we need more doctors who can communicate and be helpful just as she had been to me. You see ever since school has started a lot of the students, I have noticed, have been very cocky, rude and condescending to many of the other students and faculty. Blows my mind that a lot of these kids are going to be doctors.
Serendipitous I must say that the person with the highest and lowest grades on the Anatomy exam were in the room alone with their cadavers talking with each other coherently about the legitimate problems that face the medical community. I hope that our serendipitous was encouraging to her and that she is able to persue her dreams of becoming a doctor, for what a waste it would be to not have such a wonderful person, who would treat her patients with respect and dignity to not become the much needed doctor that society is lacking.