Ron Martin high school teacher

School hasn’t even started yet and I’m making a post. The emails from the principal and my administrator are coming fast and furious. Medical Assistant is in the second year of it being a two year course. MAI is for juniors and MAII is for seniors who were in my class last year and chose to continue and work toward certification. I have equipment and supplies waiting for us to use for lots of hands-on activities such as injections, venipuncture, eye exams, and EKGs.

Juniors will again have the opportunity to assist with hearing and vision exams at area middle and high schools with seniors acting in a supervisory role. Seniors will be able to do an externship, I hope, with the Inova Health System. This will be a valuable experience as well as look good on a resume.

I’m looking forward to another exciting year in Biotechnology Foundations. We are once again planning on a field trip to a processing lab at Inova. They put on an awesome event for us last year. I have the supplies ready for our first lab which I always do within days of school starting. And as always, we will learn a little, laugh a lot, and gain skills with biotechnology equipment.

Looking forward to seeing you all soon.

RM

I promise myself every year that I will keep up with my blog or stop paying for the domain. My students are doing amazing things in the classroom and their accomplishments should be shared. Once again though, I failed to keep up and WP just took the payment for highschoolmedicine.com so as usual, I broke both promises.

The school year is wrapping up and I’m getting my room ready for the summer. I’m going through papers and assignments, projects and experiments, and am reminded of what is already feeling like a long time ago, the awesome students I had in class this year. We in Health and Medical Sciences (HMS) are fortunate to have students who want to be in our classes. They sign up for our electives because they have an interest in health care as a career or they just want to find out if they see working in the industry is a possibility.

Also as usual and once again, I promise to try harder next year.

I and a few Biotech students visited the Inova Laboratories last Wednesday March 12th. It was awesome. The lab managers and technologists were very inviting and informative. The lab we visited in Falls Church is Inova’s reference lab. They do samples and specimens that do not need to be tested and reported STAT. My group’s tour started with phlebotomy. Inova conducts their own phlebotomy course and the instructors taught my students how to draw blood on a manikin arm. We went through all departments and was able to see gram positive and gram negative organisms through their microscopes. Most all of the lab is automated and it was fascinating to see the process. I wasn’t able to get photos in the “Gross Lab” but we were able to hold/touch/handle diseased lungs and other organs. We learned a lot and had a great time.

We’re learning a little about microbiology but having fun growing some yeasty-beasties and other things that look nasty. Bacteria, molds, and fungus are among us.

The bill for my blog comes this time every year and is always a surprise and a little painful coming so close after the holidays. I’ve paid for this site for over 15 years and some years don’t do anything with it. I always say I will post more but rarely do.

Anyway, the school year is cruising along and here’s what we will do to start the 3rd quarter in Medical Assistant. One of my favorite topics is Infection Control. We will learn the Chain of Infection which has six links. Remove one of the links and the chain is broken. I will assign a disease research project which includes doing a slide presentation and show a movie to finish the unit.

In Biotechnology we will learn about bacteria and then make agar plates. The students will swab different surfaces with a sterile cotton tip applicator and streak the plate. We’ll let the plates incubate for a couple of days and see what grows. It’s always a lot of fun and gross at the same time. Here’s a couple of plates from last year.

Did we identify the suspect? Both of my Biotechnology Foundations classes ran the multi-day Forensic DNA Fingerprinting lab. DNA evidence assists in criminal, missing persons, mass disaster, and paternity cases. It can be used to identify a perpetrator or exonerate the innocent. The Biotech students used real DNA as evidence and played the role of crime scene investigator to figure out for themselves “Who done it?” The lab went perfectly and we have definitive results which will be forwarded to the prosecutor.

We practiced pipetting into agarose gel using Karo syrup, food coloring, and distilled water. Pipetting gel requires practice. We need to put a small volume into a small space putting the tip through a buffer solution. We’ll practice once more before starting the DNA fingerprinting lab.

Some of the skits from 5th and 6th periods.

Every year we do skits using the legal terms we have learned. The groups do a skit and we have to guess which terms were acted out. This year was very entertaining.

Another successful cheek cell DNA extraction lab.