OPs
I'm firmly into midterms now. My most recent one was on Friday in palpation, and I thought I would take a minute to describe what an oral practical exam looks like at massage therapy college, because I'm sure it's unlike anything anywhere else. We're grouped into pairs, and each given a time slot in which we have to show up and do our exam. One person is scheduled to be therapist first, and the other is client, and then we switch roles. The nice thing about this set up is that I only have to be there for the 20 minutes that I'm doing my OP, and I have the rest of the class period off, but the bad thing is that you have only those 10 minutes that you're therapist to show all that you've learned up until this point in term.
I got to college Friday, and my classmates were roaming the halls, dressed according to OP dress code (polo shirt, khaki pants, ID badge, hip-slung lotion holder, closed toed shoes). The college is laid out so the halls all form a square with the classrooms on the outside and the offices and washrooms on the inside. Students clump together in the corners and review all the body parts we should know, quizzing each other and practicing our palpation on everyone who walks by. It is not uncommon to walk round a corner past a group of students and have one ask you to hold still so they can poke some part of your body.
As the first OP time slot comes up the friendly quizzing and reviewing gets a slightly panicked tinge to it with the girls (all of us are girls in my year except one guy) proclaiming their lack of knowledge and crying out that they should have studied more and they're all going to fail. This then spins into more vigorous and agitated palpation of those nearby until our skin over all the more prominent palpation points (collarbone, shoulder, jugular notch, jaw bone, etc) has grown red and sore from the constant prodding. People's carefully pulled back hair (again, for protocol) has been roughly pulled aside to find the inion (bump on the back of your head) and shirts and pants have been untucked and hitched in various directions to get to landmarks hidden by typical clothing.
The first girls get called in to do their OP and the rest of us sit pale and stricken in the hallway, whispering muscle attachments to each other and worrying about whether the attachment for pectoralis major is ribs 1-6 or 1-8, and whose notes are right, and even though we're all pretty sure it's 1-6 should we trust the term 2 (who has already passed this course) that it's 1-8? Periodically people get too worked up and bothered by the fussing around them that they hop up and walk around the square of hall to calm back down.
Finally it's my turn. I'm client first, which I hate. Being client first means that my partner does all her body parts first, stating the attachments and actions, and finding them on me. I won't have the same body parts for my exam, and yet these will all be fresh in my mind and will have the potential to confuse me. I sit on the massage table and she looks at her list of bones, muscles, and ligaments she'll have to find and point out and confirm for the examiner. The bell rings, and she starts. The first one she did pretty well. The remaining ones got worse, and worse. By the end she was stating entirely wrong attachments and palpating the wrong areas of the body, and doing the wrong actions and confirmations. I felt terrible for her, knowing that there was no way she was going to pass this exam, and yet a part of me felt relieved because the worse she did, and the more I was mentally correcting her, the more confident I grew that I knew my stuff.
My turn. I flew through them. My hands were shaking, but I was confident. Only once did I falter, forgetting the confirmation for the 12th rib, but I took the initiative and made up one that seemed to work in my mind. I'm sure it's not the one we were told, but I think it should be acceptable. I felt terrible for my partner, knowing that she must feel awful, sitting there and knowing that I was acing the same exam that she just bombed. And she must know she bombed it.
And then it was over. I was shaking, and flushed from nerves, but it was done. My peers were all out in the hall. Those that were done already talking about what parts they'd gotten and things they'd done wrong, and answering and reassuring the girls yet to go. Some who'd done badly were crying in the parking lot, and those who'd just been bodies were showing the telltale signs of nervous therapist partners by red welts where they'd been pressed too hard by nervous hands. It's a dangerous thing, being a body for an exam, because you're not allowed to talk, even to complain of pain, because that tips off the therapist that they're doing something wrong and constitutes cheating.
I have this same thing to look forward to on Wednesday when we have our massage techniques OP. It's more exhilarating than a roller coaster.
I got to college Friday, and my classmates were roaming the halls, dressed according to OP dress code (polo shirt, khaki pants, ID badge, hip-slung lotion holder, closed toed shoes). The college is laid out so the halls all form a square with the classrooms on the outside and the offices and washrooms on the inside. Students clump together in the corners and review all the body parts we should know, quizzing each other and practicing our palpation on everyone who walks by. It is not uncommon to walk round a corner past a group of students and have one ask you to hold still so they can poke some part of your body.
As the first OP time slot comes up the friendly quizzing and reviewing gets a slightly panicked tinge to it with the girls (all of us are girls in my year except one guy) proclaiming their lack of knowledge and crying out that they should have studied more and they're all going to fail. This then spins into more vigorous and agitated palpation of those nearby until our skin over all the more prominent palpation points (collarbone, shoulder, jugular notch, jaw bone, etc) has grown red and sore from the constant prodding. People's carefully pulled back hair (again, for protocol) has been roughly pulled aside to find the inion (bump on the back of your head) and shirts and pants have been untucked and hitched in various directions to get to landmarks hidden by typical clothing.
The first girls get called in to do their OP and the rest of us sit pale and stricken in the hallway, whispering muscle attachments to each other and worrying about whether the attachment for pectoralis major is ribs 1-6 or 1-8, and whose notes are right, and even though we're all pretty sure it's 1-6 should we trust the term 2 (who has already passed this course) that it's 1-8? Periodically people get too worked up and bothered by the fussing around them that they hop up and walk around the square of hall to calm back down.
Finally it's my turn. I'm client first, which I hate. Being client first means that my partner does all her body parts first, stating the attachments and actions, and finding them on me. I won't have the same body parts for my exam, and yet these will all be fresh in my mind and will have the potential to confuse me. I sit on the massage table and she looks at her list of bones, muscles, and ligaments she'll have to find and point out and confirm for the examiner. The bell rings, and she starts. The first one she did pretty well. The remaining ones got worse, and worse. By the end she was stating entirely wrong attachments and palpating the wrong areas of the body, and doing the wrong actions and confirmations. I felt terrible for her, knowing that there was no way she was going to pass this exam, and yet a part of me felt relieved because the worse she did, and the more I was mentally correcting her, the more confident I grew that I knew my stuff.
My turn. I flew through them. My hands were shaking, but I was confident. Only once did I falter, forgetting the confirmation for the 12th rib, but I took the initiative and made up one that seemed to work in my mind. I'm sure it's not the one we were told, but I think it should be acceptable. I felt terrible for my partner, knowing that she must feel awful, sitting there and knowing that I was acing the same exam that she just bombed. And she must know she bombed it.
And then it was over. I was shaking, and flushed from nerves, but it was done. My peers were all out in the hall. Those that were done already talking about what parts they'd gotten and things they'd done wrong, and answering and reassuring the girls yet to go. Some who'd done badly were crying in the parking lot, and those who'd just been bodies were showing the telltale signs of nervous therapist partners by red welts where they'd been pressed too hard by nervous hands. It's a dangerous thing, being a body for an exam, because you're not allowed to talk, even to complain of pain, because that tips off the therapist that they're doing something wrong and constitutes cheating.
I have this same thing to look forward to on Wednesday when we have our massage techniques OP. It's more exhilarating than a roller coaster.
posted by Haley @ 11:27 a.m.
