I M P U L S I V E

I mpulsive
M oody
P aranoid under stress
U nstable self image
L abile intense relationships
S uicidal
I nappropriate anger
V ulnerable to abandonment
E mptiness

Law School Outline Drama … you’re not the only one experiencing it! Mr. Law School presents a hilarious account of Type-A fanaticals during final exams … fighting, chaos, lies,

What's the mnemonic to help us spell "field" correctly?

A mnemonic is a sentence or short poem to help you remember something. I’ve always been on the lookout for good mnemonics to help in my teaching, and awhile ago I came across a really neat little book called i before e – old school ways to remember stuff. I thought I’d share six fun little mnemonics that you can use in your teaching (well, maybe not the last one…).

1 Spelling rule: i before e, except after c. This is the most famous one, used to remind us how to spell words like friend, or field. Actually, to make up for the exceptions like weight (which goes against the rule) there is a longer version I found which goes

i before e, except after c

or when sounded like a, as in neighbour and weigh.

2 Spelling Wednesday – remember how to spell this with the following. The book I mentioned above has a whole chapter of these!

WE Do Not Eat Soup Day

3 The months of the year. Most readers will probably be familiar with this one, Thirty days has (originally hath) September, April June and November; All the rest have thirty-one… But how does it end? I always ended with the lame “except February, which has twenty-eight”. I’ve found two other versions though, which I put below.

Excepting February alone, And that has twenty-eight days clear, with twenty-nine in each leap year.

Excepting February alone, which has but twenty-eight, in fine, till leap year gives it twenty-nine.

4 Parts of speech. The American readers of this blog might have been familiar with a song: Conjunction junction what’s your functio (if you are one of those poor deprived souls who did not grow up with Schoolhouse Rock, you can see a video here) Anyway, here are a couple of others:

The preposition shows relation, as in the street, or at the station.

Conjunctions join in many ways, sentences, words or phrase and phrase.

5 Commas. I think this one is cute:

A cat has claws at the end of its paws

A comma’s a pause at the end of a clause.

6 Finally… I wanted to include one very useful mnemonic for English teachers for the upcoming end-of-year party (and also to get this in before the TEFL Tradesman said it

Beer before liquor, never sicker… Liquor before beer, never fear.

I’m not old enough to remember the 2^nd World War, having been born three years after the end of it, but books about what it was like during the war (rather than books about military campaigns) often fascinate me. The Black-out Book [Osprey £9.99 9781846039232] is a case in point. It’s a compilation of games puzzles, short poems, quotations and so on which were intended to help while away the hours spent stuck in air raid shelters during the long nights of the blitz. The compiler is “Evelyn August” – actually a pseudonym for two people: Sydney and Muriel Box, who were both film producers and one of their films won an Oscar for best original screenplay in 1946. As to the book, well it’s probably something you’ll love or hate. I found it very twee and dated, but then that’s what it’s bound to be. Perhaps in spite of myself, I couldn’t help dipping into it time and time again. It really is something that still fulfils its purpose of helping to while away a spare moment. We may not have any air raids going on at the moment, thank goodness, but the world still has plenty of troubles and we need to be distracted from time to time to keep our heads.

There’s a series of books that has been available for some time now which seems to be aimed at those who fondly remember  their school days and the old fashioned ways in which we used to learn.  I Before E (Except After C): Old-School Ways to Remember Stuff [Michael O’Mara  978-1843172499 £9.99] was one of the first and one which I may have mentioned before.  Later ones include Thirty Days Has September [Buster Books  £7.99 978-1906082260]. It’s a later addition to the series, but seems to be aimed more at young people than adults. It claims to help you remember all those rules of science, spelling, history and geography by employing all those tricks which have stood the test of time. It includes a lot of mnemonics such as My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas being a way to remember the names of the planets – as long as you can remember what the letters stood for.  By the way, I was always taught that it was “Thirty days hath September”.

If it’s maths you have trouble with, then you might need As Easy As Pi: Stuff about numbers that isn’t (just) maths by Jamie Buchan [Michael O’Mara Books £9.99 978-1843173557] It’s aimed at all number enthusiasts and includes not just useful mathematical rules but also fascinating numerical facts (such as why is the number 7 so significant?), numbers used as slang and even pop culture trivia. There’s even a section on numbers used in TV programmes, including fake telephone numbers.

Finally two books, each with a worthy cause in mind; The Hero Inside [ Quiller Publishing, £9.99 978-1846890765 ] looks at the efforts of those who have been fund raising for the charity Help for Heroes and the heroes for whom they have been working.  It’s the officially authorised fund-raising book for Help for Heroes, the charity founded in 2007 to support servicemen and women wounded in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is superbly illustrated and the front cover photo includes Joanna Lumley – what more could you want?

Another worthwhile cause is the BBC’s “Children in Need” charity and, for Terry Wogan fans, one way of contributing to that is to buy See John Run by Kevin Joslin [Headline £9.99 978-0755319961]. It’s a complete collection of the Janet and John Marsh stories as read by Terry during the last four years on his Radio 2 morning show. Full of double entendre and innuendo,  it has been almost unanimously acclaimed as a really good giggle.

Quarter of a century. Have I made any difference in anybody's life? Did I change the world for the better?

A couple of observations

• not many people remembered
• one person I wasn’t very close with, remembered
• this year, my parents remembered
• this year, I remembered too =)
• Because it’s 3 days before my 1st paper
• I actually honestly, don’t really care who remembered (because life got too painful)
• Someone brought me a cake
• Didn’t like the cake
• Adore the “someone” though, &
• Life goes on while this globe keeps on spinning…

“His”, “Hers” and “Its” have no apostrophe.

“He’s”, “She’s” and “It’s” do.

So to help decide where to put the apostrophe, personify the pronoun. If you have a sentence like “It’s going to shed its skin”, use “He’s going to shed his skin”. It’s best to use the male form to keep the trailing “s”, because “Hers” is incorrect in places where “Her” should be used instead.

Using an apostrophe to save the effort of writing a little “i” hardly seems worth all the confusion. But that’s the way it is.

March two forward; Knock one back.

DST starts on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first Sunday in November, which leads to the “two” and the “one” in my phrase. “Knock” is a strained mnemonic for November but its the best I can come up with. It’s also reminiscent of Halloween, and the first Sunday in November also happens to be the first Sunday after Halloween. Unfortunately, these start and end times may change someday; they’ve only been in effect since 2007.

As far as remembering if we’re actually changing to DST or from DST, two thoughts should help. The first is that the the old phrase “Spring Forward; Fall Back”, and my new one, are both analogous to DST’s start and end. Spring, or March, is when it starts, Fall, or November, is when it ends.

The second thought is that the name is misleading, since you’d think you’d be “saving” daylight when you don’t have much, like in the winter. In fact, the idea isn’t to save daylight when it’s scarce, but to avoid wasting it when it’s plentiful. We change our clocks in order to wake up earlier with the earlier sunrise. We should have called it “Daylight Using Time”, but unfortunately, I didn’t have a blog back then, so the misleading name stuck.

And remember, it’s “Saving”, not “Savings”.

As we continue to make adjustments to our instruction based on the results of the 6-week benchmarks, pacing guides, and formative assessments, retention is a common area of concern. Putting strategies in place to assist students with comprehension and retention of lesson concepts will decrease student and teacher frustration.

Consider poor old Aunt Sally. She’s constantly making mistakes in the mathematical order of operations. You will have to excuse her if you already understand when to perform each order of operation: parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction.

“Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally” is an extension of PEMDAS, the classic acronym for the order of mathematical operations. This mnemonic device assists students daily in understanding what to do and in what order. When you think about it, PEMDAS is also a summarization strategy. Creating acronyms for concepts, cycles, protocols, sequences, and systems is a great way to allow students to summarize and retain information.

One way to begin is by asking students to list the essential attributes of something that you have been teaching. For example, say that you have been focusing on how to write good introductions to essays. In response to your prompt, students might generate a list that includes the following:

• Hook the reader with an interesting attention getter that provides background information to set the stage for your thesis.
• Add your thesis statement.
• Provide an organizational hint to serve as a preview for the content of the essay.
• Use a clincher to transition from the introduction to the first body paragraph.

Great information on summarization can be found in this book. See me to borrow a copy.

Then, ask your students to examine each attribute and identify a single term to serve as a key word for remembering that attribute. This group activity involves discussing and deciding on key words, providing yet another opportunity for summarization. Key words for remembering how to write good essay introductions might be attention getter (AG), thesis (T), organizational hint (OH), and clincher (C).

Now it’s simply a matter of sequencing the letters in an order that makes sense. If the attributes are things that do not need to be in a specific sequence, then all the students have to do is move the letters around until something coherent and meaningful emerges. If the sequence is set, such as the steps in a math problem, the process of how a bill goes through Congress, or the metamorphosis of mealworms, the order of the letters is nonnegotiable, and creating a memorable acronym can be a bit more challenging, but it is certainly a worthwhile task.

This technique can also work as a pre-assessment activity. You might ask your students to create an initial list of attributes as a whole class activity. Then, have the students revise the lists on their own (another opportunity for summarizing). As mnemonic devices, acronyms can be even more powerful when created by students themselves. Consider asking each student to design his or her own acronyms for something to be studied, and then vote on the top three. The voting criteria might include clarity, accuracy, and how easily the acronym can be remembered.

See me if you would like to borrow this book.

Summarization is not only a technique proven to improve student achievement, but it is also a method of formative assessment that can help you assess where your students are and help them self-assess. By implementing various summarization strategies, we can help provide students with yet another exposure to higher-order thinking activities.

References

Marzano, R. J., Pickering, D. J., & Pollock, J. E. (2001). Classroom instruction that works: Research-based strategies for increasing student achievement. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Westerberg, T. R. (2009). Becoming a great high school: 6 strategies and 1 attitude that make a difference. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Wormeli, R. (2004). Summarization in any subject: 50 techniques to improve student learning. Alexandria, VA: Association For Supervision and Curriculum Development.

With law school exams right around the corner, it is not too soon to be thinking about your study approach. For some people, it was being a stenographer of commercial outlines and creating a 100 page outline. For me, I always liked to see the whole big picture on just a couple pages. Then, once I understood how the main concepts fit together, I was able to build on that knowledge. I found these checklists and mnemonic useful for helping me prepare for law school exams.

• Real Property Essay Checklist
• Torts Essay Checklist
• Federal Civil Procedure Essay Checklist
• Evidence Essay Checklist
• Criminal Law Essay Checklist
• Constitutional Law Essay Approach
• Commercial Paper Essay Approach
• Civil Procedure Essay Checklist
• Contracts Essay Checklist
• Corporations Essay Checklist
• Family Law-EssayApproach
• Equity Essay Approach
• Secured Transactions EssayApproach
• Agency and Partnership Essay Approach
• Trusts Essay Checklist
• Wills Essay Checklist
• Civil Procedure Essay Checklist

C olitis (inflammatory, infectious, ischemic, radiation)
H emerrhoids
A ngiodysplasia
N eoplasia
D iverticulosis

It is about time to introduce my other project Mnemocine. Actually, this website has been on Internet since June 2008, but I work on it slowly and that’s why I didn’t want to introduce it earlier. The first name of the website was ExTremish, but later on the name was changed to Mnemocine. ExTremish has had some very good reviews in other blogs such as scienceroll (the blog of the famous Medicine 2.0 pioneer Bertalan Mesco, @Berci), and also on twitter. Even the medical guru blogger Ves Dimov, @DrVes from clincialcases mentioned ExTremish in his tweets.

It has been a dream of mine to have a website with collection of medical mnemonics. The idea is to have only the best medical mnemonics. That’s why so far I am the administrator and moderator of the website, trying to select medical mnemonics that make sense. I know, that there are plenty of mnemonics on the net, but they are not organized well, and the good medical mnemonics can’t be find among the rest of the clutter.

Don’t hesitate to send your mnemonics to Mnemocine, using the “submit a mnemonic” form.

Projekt portalu społecznościowego związanego z Adobe Creative Suite 4 (www.kreatywnybazar.pl)

Here we’ve indexed the best medical resources from the web. Leave your emails to get information about these resources and how to get them easily.

Uptodate 17.2 for Windows, Mac

Usmle World Question Banks for Windows and Mac

Kaplan Question Banks

Webpath

Gyrus

Primal 3D anatomy software

Amazing Iphone Applications :

Diagnosis Pro 5.0

Epocrates

Lexi-Comp

Skyscape Medical Resources

BlackBag

WebMD

Medpage Today

The Best Medical Sites :

http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/

http://www.healthcentral.com/

www.webmd.com

www.pubmed.com

The Best Medical Ebooks:

Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine 17th edition

Current Medical Diagnosis and Treatment

Additional Resources :

Internal Medicine Quiz

For any suggestions or software requests write to meetanshul@gmail.com. We do not provide any software but can help you get these from indexed sites by providing links.

H TN
E ndocarditis
A rrhythmia
R heumatic Fever
T hyrotoxicosis
F ailure to take meds
A nemia
I schemia, Infarct, Infection
L ung pathology
E nvironment
D ietary indiscretion

Consider double coverage when pt has:

S erratia
P seudomonas
A ctinobacter
C itrobacter
E nterobacter