 So I love thinking about teaching, and the beginning of the semester is always like super fun for me because I get to think about, okay, how am I going to do it this time? And most semesters people just go, oh geez, really? Are you really going to redesign your entire course? Because I often am kind of rabid about making improvements. But I've been doing this long enough to have boiled down my priorities. And I realized that if I check my ideas against these three concepts, most of the time my ideas are somehow resting on these three pillars, foundational ideas. So I'm going to explain them to you. I'm going to just tell you kind of where I am just so you can have something that you can look at it and go, yeah, that makes sense, and that makes sense, and that's cool, which lets you have a little more buy-in to some of the weirdness that you are going to possibly experience. Let's start in this corner. In this corner we have motivation. I'm starting in the motivation corner because it's critical to me that I somehow tie in to what authentically and truly motivates you, like what is interesting to you and what is valuable to you. And I frame, that's the first thing that I, that's the first layer of decision making is content. And how is it relevant and why does it matter and why should you care? And if I can't justify it, I ditch it. Like it's not going to stay in the class. I need to know that you're going to care about the concepts that I'm bringing to you. And dude, I hit the freaking jackpot in getting to teach anatomy and physiology because most of you are aiming for some sort of healthcare field. And anatomy and physiology are the foundational pieces of any field that's dealing with human health. So that one's easy. I don't even have to think about it very long because most of the stuff we talk about, you find just as cool as I find. The second foundational piece is one that I find in every aspect of my life. I don't know, I think it was three years ago that I was introduced to this idea of the growth mindset versus the fixed mindset. They've done research on this concept and have shown that students with equal IQs or whatever with growth mindsets are more successful in school than students with fixed mindsets. A growth mindset looks at challenge as challenge, looks at failure as feedback, and takes those challenges as kind of like, why did I miss that? How can I do it better next time? And students who have that mindset are more successful academically. The fixed mindset looks at failure, challenge, feedback as proof that they're dumb and that they can't do it. And it's super sad to me. And it's sort of personal because I have two small humans in my household and one of them has a growth mindset and the other one has a fixed mindset. And it's pretty amazing to watch my little fixed mindset man and sad to watch him be really, really down on himself. Like if he doesn't do well at something, how he approaches it like, well, clearly now you all know that I'm dumb. You cannot have a fixed... No, you can have a fixed mindset in my class, but you will be so much better off with a growth mindset. Almost all the way through physio there is redemption and feedback, you're going to get lots of it. And I am going to expect growth over time. And one of the most significant areas where you get to demonstrate or practice a growth mindset is with this integration project. And I've dedicated an entire topic to the integration project because it is a sort of controversial topic and maybe not so well supported out in the universe, but I'm going to tell you why you actually are going to love this project. And having a growth mindset is going to be very helpful. In anatomy, I do something with a comprehensive final exam that you have the option of, well, it's a required final exam in anatomy, but it will replace one of the midterm, your lowest midterm scores if your comprehensive final score is higher. And I do a similar thing in physio. So you will have a chance to demonstrate your understanding eventually. And so you're never really lost or sunk in the class. Sometimes these concepts take a while to put together. It's amazing when you get to the end of the course to look at what you know and you learn a lot in this class. So having a growth mindset is definitely advantageous and it's something that I focus on a lot. And the last one is, you know, the buzzword is active learning. The fact is that if you don't engage with the learning process, like truly engage, you all know that you've read textbooks before where you sit there and you read, but you're not engaged and you get to the end of the page and you're like, dude, I think I read that, but I got nothing. I have no idea what I read. I couldn't talk about it. I couldn't explain it to anybody. Because you were passively going through the motions, you weren't actively engaged with the concepts. You're about to experience a flipped classroom. And in this flipped environment, I flip because it gives us time to do active learning together. So you will be out there actively, actively-ness, and I get to provide feedback and answer questions and you get my expertise at the same time. So I do a lot of stuff to try and make sure that you stay active in what you're doing because I don't want you to waste your time. This class is hard no matter where you take it, no matter who you take it from, it's hard. This topic is challenging, but the more engaged you are with your process and thinking about the content, it's totally doable. Okay, so those are my pillars. Now let's talk about the flipped classroom because this is something that if you don't know me or you haven't experienced this, it might be a little stressful at first. Nah, it won't be stressful at all.