Immuno Rage

I cannot quite remember any class that has inspired such rage. It was not the material itself, which I liked, or even the obscure clinical trials, some of which were interesting but mostly boiled down to: oops, this TNF blocker for rheumatoid arthritis gives you cancer (which the FDA didn't spot until after it was approved) or uh-oh, looks like you can get progressive leukoencephalopathy from your psoriasis meds (all of which convinced me to tell everyone I know to stay away from Phase 1 and 2 trials).
I also feel like a good chunk of immunology is guesswork - we know how certain things interact and many of the big players, but ultimately it's an extermely complex system that we're just scratching the surface of. And when we mess with one thing, say nTregs, the consequences are often unexpected and vary widely from model organisms. There are many diseases that people are suffering from today and I do sympathize with the urgency to develop drugs to help them even with incomplete info. I guess that is part of the challenge of medicine: sometimes it means operating on partial info in desperate situations, especially with cancer and painful, chronic diseases.

But anyway, what really got me about this course was the questions! For some reason the way these questions were worded and presented with the material just burned me up! I have not felt this angry at a class before. I can maybe blame the heat, or that I needed on object at which to focus my unspecified rage (Dr. S), but I don't know. After the exam there were the typical discussions about questions and complaints about the course. I managed to distill my issues into two main points:

1. The material was presented poorly from the beginning without a big picture, proper diagrams, or any good interconnection and context. We were expected to straight up memorize random letters and names with little info for how they interacted and that just don't work for me!
2. There were major inconsistencies between the material presented in class, the notes provided and the lack of a real textbook meant we went shopping for various sources (purple book, white book, red book, brown book, HY, wikipedia) many of which gave conflicting info about basic topics (like HLAs that never showed up on the exam btw)

These two factors combined with poorly worded questions made for an extremely frustrating course. When I said this to a few people outside the test, one guy said the following "Those are two great points that, as SGA representatives, we have brought to her attention. She said you will thank me later for teaching you how to learn." Wow, haven't seen such arrogance and idiocy since the days of Bush II. Yet, if I did well and got within the grade range I think I did, I will admit that the trial by fire of having to teach myself the course did at least emphasize that I am a dedicated visual diagram learner. I understood this before, but I suppose now I know it for sure. But let's not be too conciliatory until the grades are out...