School is Cool

Dental school is different from any school I've ever been to. It's like a combination of a graduate school and a technical school because while you need to learn lots of "book knowledge," you also need to learn many technical skills. This unique combination leads to sentences like the following in my course materials:

"To feel the medial pterygoid muscle: Place the index finger a little posterior to the traditional insertion site for an inferior alveolar injection and press laterally. If your partner gags, your finger is too posterior."

Love it! (And I'm sure there were some gagging issues that day--but I had a good partner, so no puke for me.) All of you out there can be glad that I'm practicing gagging a dental school partner right now, because someday I might be working on you!

Unfortunately, not all of our course materials are as amusing as the latter. The material I'm studying right now feels like someone spent a very long time trying to confuse me with their notes. Examples:

What they write: "Other chemical forms of waxes include the esters (CnH2n+1COOCmH2m+1) as mentioned above and n and m are in the range of 15-30, and alkanols (CnH2n+1OH) and alkanoic acids (CnH2n+1COOH) if n is sufficiently large."

What they mean: "There are three types of waxes, all are long chained hydrocarbons."

What they write: "Since there really is both a volumetric contraction caused by the chemistry of the reaction and an expansion caused by the thrusting of the crystals, porosity is induced in the set material."

What they mean: "Crystals expand and hit each other, causing small pores to form."

What they say: "This accounts for the larger thermal expansion in the alpha form versus the beta forms as the silica undergoes transition from the alpha to beta form, since this decrease in free volume is reversed."

What they mean: "...?"

Dental school--always an adventure!