20th day

I had Histo lab in the morning today and oh my, we had a bad teacher this time. From the first look, I could tell she was either extremely tired, bored, or just did not want to be there. As usual, we took turns presenting. We were supposed to present slides for connective tissue and blood. I forgot to prepare for the blood, so I volunteered to present the connective tissue. I ended up presenting all of it, which was good. The blood stuff was actually pretty easy too and didn't need any preparation. I had asked a lot of questions, but some of them she seemed like she didn't care or didn't know the answer. One of the questions was "If platelets are just fragments of megakaryocytes, they do not possess a nucleus, so how do they know to clot?". She clearly did not know the answer to this nor anyone else in the group, even though some of them are bio and microbio majors. She even answered me back with another question, "Red blood cells also do not have a nuclei, so how do they know?". I answered her question stating that RBCs originally had a nucleus that degenerated later in its development and they don't need a nucleus b/c they have hemoglobin which attracts the oxygen and just serve as carriers of oxygen. I asked similar questions, but her answer would either be "you don't need to know this for the exam or I don't know". Most of the students also prefer to just know "what is on the exam" and not anything further. Too bad I can't take the exam right now lol.


After the presentations were over, I asked the professor of the course and he answered me clearly. It is due to the presence of chemotactic factors and receptors on platelets that allow them to know where to go. I hope we get a more interested teacher next time, someone who actually enjoys the hows and whys, not just the whats.

I had an omelette for breakfast and studied biochem until class started. I wasn't able to actually finish pre-reading biochem (this is the first time that's happened). It's because we are learning some new things that I've never seen before like dna replication. I took 1 Biology course in the 1st semester of the 1st year of my undergrad and that's the only time I learned about dna replication, so I had to go a little slower to read it this time. Because of this, the lecture was hard to keep up with today. I'll have to post-read now. Oh well.

Tonight's biochem+anatomy. Anatomy I got down like the back of my hand, literally, so it's just going to be review. I have to do some case studies though for my lab tomorrow.