Pre-class preparations.

In which I get a little bit technical.
But mostly to put off doing something I don't want to do.

Because of little things like kidney stones disrupting my schedule, I am extremely far behind on my class preparations.  How far?  Well, let's break it down:  of a 3 hour lecture I need to give tuesday evening, I have exactly 0 minutes planned out.  When I woke up this morning I had only read half of the course material.

Yes, yes, it is all stuff I've studied before, but it isn't necessarily stuff I know.  I have to relearn these materials before I can teach them.  It is, naturally, easier when the topics are most closely related to my area of expertise (signal transduction pathways that regulate cell growth).  It is also easier when reviewing basics- like this week, we are discussing transporters and channels. These are little motors or pores that help things move in and out of your cell.  It is very important that things don't move in and out willy nilly, so we have many different motors and pores that each are specific for a certain kind of molecule.   This topic takes some review, but these are molecules that I am familiar with, at least.  Until this morning when I started to flip through the remainder of the chapter and saw what was coming up:  once you start talking about channels you need to discuss ion channels.  Which leads to membrane potentials.  Which leads to action potentials.  Dah dah daaahhh... neurobiology!

Figure 1:  A schematic of a typical action potential. See what I am up against?  ( from wikimedia commons) 

Yuck. (No offense Stacey.) As a graduate student I finally took my first neuroscience class; I was seeking to fill a void in my knowledge.  I discovered that there was a reason I had avoided that class for so long:  it was just not my thing.  As in, I didn't get it. Fortunately, at the time, my lab shared some space with a neuropharmacology lab; and one day I was sitting in our break room particularly frustrated over some basic neurobiological topic, when the PI of that lab walked past to freshen up his cup of coffee.  Jim was my saviour that day, because he sat down and in just a few minutes clarified everything.

I need Jim today.  Do you think I can have a guest lecturer come in? Do you know how much easier it would be to prepare for lectures if I could do that?

So here it is, my status as of now:
Reading: 75%
Lecture: 0 %

When my new status bar (scroll up and to the right!) reaches 100%, I will do a little happy dance.  Hopefully, that occurs way before 6 pm tuesday.