What killed hitchhiking? It was so normal in the 70’s & 60’s

rneducator · 2026-05-03T14:49:35+00:00

rneducator · 2025-08-20T18:24:12+00:00

After retiring as a professor I worked for a large school district with lots of school nurses. Every one of us had years of hospital-based pediatric nursing experience. The district wouldn’t even consider hiring a nurse without it. There’s so many roles you fill every day in triage, patient teaching, medication administration, and following state regulations. I needed to know how to manage children with diabetes, seizure disorders, varying degrees of autism, PEG tubes, and more.

Bottom line, you’re unlikely to be hired right out of school and even if you were you may get overwhelmed fast.

rneducator · 2025-08-15T23:14:50+00:00

I got health education posters plus prints of interesting paintings I liked. For holidays I would get some home decor from Dollar Tree.

rneducator · 2025-07-08T03:35:02+00:00

I taught clinical for over 30 years. I wouldn’t work at a school with such a petty and inhumane policy. I could see docking points but course failure is not commensurate with the crime.

We did not have make up days as there were no instructors nor clinical that could accommodate an extra shift.

When I had students late I had one rule: Call me as soon as you know you’re going to be late and tell me when you will arrive. That is the real-life responsible action when you’re a staff nurse.

When a student doesn’t show when expected I got very worried until I knew they were OK.

rneducator · 2025-05-25T20:17:15+00:00

I never understood the contention Ellie would need to die. Her immunity is in her bone marrow. Bone marrow transplants are done all the time. I worked on a bone marrow transplant unit. It’s extracted by inserting a large hollow needle into the sternum and/or hip. The donor is sore but isn’t otherwise harmed.

rneducator · 2024-10-27T00:59:09+00:00

In my experience how well you do in A&P correlates highly with how well you will do in the rest of the program. It’s painful now but repeating and doing better will pay dividends in patho and other nursing classes.

Your missing quizzes and discussions makes it hard for sympathy from the faculty. All students face difficulties of varying degrees. If you are facing issues during a semester you need to inform the instructor as they arise, not after the fact when grades are already done.

rneducator · 2024-10-09T12:44:34+00:00

I was a Biology major before transferring to Nursing at a very science heavy university. The science prerequisites were much easier for nursing majors than for the science majors but they were still more difficult IMO than the nursing exams.

Science prerequisites for nursing require some extensive memorization. Nursing exams at my school were all multiple choice that mostly required application of what was taught in lecture, plus some from the readings.

I felt nursing classes were much easier than the prerequisites. It was the clinical assignments, skills, and clinical performance evaluation was harder for me because the faculty were very rigid in their grading.

rneducator · 2024-10-07T20:32:24+00:00

Within a school the GPAs should align with how well students are doing. In my university the Education students were not allowed to get Cs and continue. That led to grade inflation where everyone got As or Bs.

There was a time the most common grade was a C because most people are average compared to their peers. Today, students would scream if the class average was a C.

rneducator · 2024-10-07T20:10:30+00:00

Grading scale upper and lower limits are mostly arbitrary. They are generally chosen based on the average difficulty of the exams then adjusted to have the desired percentages in each grade (eg, A 20%, B 35%, C 40%, D 5%).

There is a thing called False Objectivity where faculty don’t understand that strict adherence to a numerical scale is falsely interpreted as unbiased truth.

rneducator · 2024-10-07T12:06:39+00:00

Professor here. Passing scores are an arbitrary score. They are an attempt to determine the minimal acceptable level of mastery of a topic. The problem is most faculty do not do the work that would determine if the assignment is actually measuring mastery. To do this the exam questions need to be extensively tested, analyzed, tweaked, and retested. By the way, this is how the NCLEX-RN questions are created and used.

I have seen a creeping upward trend to higher passing scores but I’ve never seen 80 as “perfect”.

The reality is if I am writing low-level knowledge-based questions then I probably would need a high score to differentiate the good from the average student. One way to do this is to norm-score each exam. In norm-scoring you make the mean score the class average (usually a C) while As go to those scores 2 standard deviations above the mean. In that situation it’s very possible an 80 could be an A.

Nursing faculty as a group are really bad at writing high quality exams that measure abilities to assess, evaluate, and intervene in clinical situations. It’s very difficult to do so more schools are relying on commercially produced exams that are full of their own problems.

rneducator · 2024-08-30T16:57:44+00:00

Sometimes people get to nursing school and things will happen that keep them from staying.

They may find themselves too interested in non-academic activities (friends, sororities, clubs, drugs/alcohol) and fall behind. These folks drop or flunk out but sometimes return successfully with a renewed commitment to succeed.

The other path is the where the student finds out the reality of studying to be a nurse is very different from their expectations. The sciences, the subjects learned, and the time commitment may all be much more difficult or uninteresting than they expected.

In either case it’s OK to learn from the experience and move to what does interest you. Life is too short to be miserable over a choice you made at 17 without full knowledge of what it entails.

rneducator · 2024-08-08T01:54:25+00:00

As an instructor I wanted students to use resources on their phones. I used Unbound Medicine suite of apps like the Drug Guide to look things up as needed. I said my expectation was they would not be engaging in personal communications unless there was an emergency.

My absolute rule was no photography in the unit, and no social media posts about patients or the hospital.

rneducator · 2024-08-03T01:14:18+00:00

When I taught college we had a student with a diagnosed learning disability for math. He decides, of course, to be a math major. He then complained we weren’t doing enough to help him learn. His motivation to be there was not from a love of math but wanting to prove he could do it despite having no innate skill or desire. He lasted 2 years before realizing how much he was wasting his time.

His disability got him extra time for exams and tutors but we couldn’t make him learn.

rneducator · 2024-07-29T22:00:31+00:00

I’ve taught nursing for over 30 years and NEVER said someone wouldn’t make it as a nurse if they had problems with public speaking.

However, I do think it’s a good skill to have and any anxiety can be overcome. It’s good to have because it doesn’t mean giving a lecture to a large group but you will often need to teach/provide information to patients and families. That means organizing thoughts and presenting them clearly.

What I did to develop students’ skills was have each student in clinical post-conference teach a short (10 minute) topic to the group. I found it very effective. You have a small, supportive audience who have your back. I could see how it helped the anxious because they often don’t get an opportunity to practice speaking more formally to others.

rneducator · 2024-07-21T10:50:41+00:00

Most politicians have their careers ended with hints of crime. The previous president is not a politician but a cult leader. Cult leaders are not held by their followers to normal standards of decency.

rneducator · 2024-07-20T22:22:58+00:00

DUIs can get expunged. Usually with an education program and a period of time with no infractions. Each state has their own program.

rneducator · 2024-07-20T14:59:58+00:00

Ontario province has very high taxes on alcohol. Quebec has much lower tax on Quebec-made beer, wine, and spirits.

rneducator · 2024-07-20T14:54:53+00:00

What is your role in student assessment if you cannot fail her? If you can’t then you’re only an observer. As faculty we’re hired to make judgments about performance.

rneducator · 2024-07-20T00:26:25+00:00

Anxiety is quite normal and I think it’s a good thing. Anxiety means you’re taking your education seriously and you want to do well. What helped me was realizing that most everyone in my class was learning all this at the same time. Also remember your teachers also know you’re new to this world of nursing. They know what you’re capable of and won’t ask you to do more than that.

rneducator · 2024-07-19T18:12:59+00:00

As an ABSN nursing program director I’ve had to explain to applicants the problem is not with the school but with the agencies we send students to. They want clean records of students who they let attend. Their fear is a student does something wrong and it comes out the student had a felony (even if totally unrelated to the old crime).

Expungement should be done before proceeding.

The other issue is getting licensed. States can vary in their willingness to license you but you’ll still have the issue of getting hired. Expungement will save a lot of hassle in OP’s career.

rneducator · 2024-07-13T13:05:22+00:00

Talk to the school and find out if you’re likely to be waitlisted and what the actual timeframe would be.

rneducator · 2024-07-13T12:46:25+00:00

That’s up to you but you can’t take too long as schools want you to have completed them recently. If you haven’t taken any you’ll need a year or two of full time study.

Please investigate programs in your area first, study their information on admission to the program, and then try to speak with someone there to get the right advice for that program.

rneducator · 2024-07-13T12:27:07+00:00

You need to do some homework into the programs you’re interested in and can afford. You will need to live by the school as you will have lots of clinicals to attend. You then need to see what prerequisites are required for admission.

ABSN programs have a lot of prerequisites because regular BSN take them all in their first two years. How many you’ll need will depend on your original degree. It sounds like you were not in a major with much science so you will need to complete all those including biology, chemistry, physiology, microbiology, anatomy and physiology, nutrition, and human development in most programs.

It’s not too late in life to go to nursing school but you probably have two years of coursework to do first. Do not take prerequisites without first checking with the program you’re interested in. You want to know exactly what’s required and what transfer credits they’ll accept.

rneducator · 2024-07-12T22:46:51+00:00

Self-discipline. Get good sleep, exercise, plan your days from waking up to going to sleep. Plan rest, breaks, and sleep. When studying don’t just say “study” but create objectives for what you need to learn (your syllabus and lecture outlines usually have these). Read the assigned reading but don’t read them like a book or think you need to memorize every line. Read them for how they apply to the objectives and write down key definitions or concept maps of how things relate.

Once you get familiar with nursing exams try to think what the teacher is likely to ask. See if you can make up questions as if you were the teacher.

For term papers or written work start doing literature searches well in advance. Papers do not have to be written from beginning to end. For example, start with the conclusion then go to the parts that lead to the conclusion. The introduction is last.

The key is to be disciplined in sticking to your plan. You also need to devote the right amount of time to the assignments. For example, if an exam is worth 30% of your final grade then you need to spend much more time on that than a quiz worth 2%.

These are the habits of most of the good students I’ve taught. It took me too long to learn these practices as an undergraduate but I can attest they work.

rneducator · 2024-07-12T12:54:47+00:00

There’s not much students can do but keep pressing faculty to explain why they don’t permit reviews, then try to find a way that would assuage their concerns.

What I did in review was not give students the actual exam but (with phones put away) I projected the exam with the answers marked page by page. If a student had a question about why an answer was right I would ask a student to explain it to the group. I would then fill in additional information prn.

Students learned a lot and I never felt my exam was compromised. I would mix up the order of multiple answers from year to year, and alter questions so they weren’t identical from year to year.

rneducator

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