The silver lining of all the canceled in-person meetings, conferences, and classes could be finding one teacher that inspires you despite all the challenges 2020 has wrought. For anatomy instructors, that teacher might be Brandee Gillham. Earlier this year, the Colorado mother of four spent scores of lonely, late-night sessions in her basement, during which she served as a presenter, director, and production assistant to many hours of filming. The results are available in the

For all the challenging news around pandemic-related learning, there’s something really fabulous developing in Ceres, California. Thanks to Renee Melo, a 25-year teaching veteran and a local Teacher of the Year, 160 students will learn anatomy while practicing distance learning at Central Valley High School. All 160 students will have their own Anatomy in Clay® Learning System model at home. Thanks to additional, COVID-19 funding for her district—made available through the fe

If there’s a silver lining to the tragedy of the Covid19 pandemic, it’s what we are learning and appreciating about our place on the planet and how our human existence impacts and is impacted by our fellow species. Nearly everything on earth has an anatomy. SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the disease we know as Covid19, has an anatomy. It’s in the family of corona viruses that all look similarly on a microscopic scale, with spikes stemming from a spherical surface. SARS, MERS, a

You all know the famous quip by W.C. Fields: “Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.” Even as we head into the second half of 2020, that observation seems more apt than ever. How did basic public health become a divisive issue? If you were a horse, would you bet on us humans to get on top of this disease? We wish we could say the trends in the United States were as promising as the trends in Europe. Alas, that’s not the case. Yet! While we

As anyone whose surfed the web lately knows, there are increasingly more options for exploring anatomy. Three-dimensional and now augmented reality have become new options for learning. But do students really learn better? Research is just starting to answer this question. This study in Anatomy and Cell Biology found that 3D learning “is not very helpful in acquiring deep anatomical knowledge or memorizing the location of anatomical structures” but does have other benefits. A

We are living in a tough time. The spread of COVID-19 is a generational event. We will remember 2020 for years and years to come. We can’t begin to imagine the changes this pandemic will prompt. The changes to our current day-to-day lives—in countries across the world—are enormously disruptive. It’s very hard to understand what life will look like when the threat from this pandemic subsides. (And it will.) As doctors and health care workers treat the large numbers of those wh

The anxiety over the spread of COVID-19 (a.k.a. coronavirus) in the early months of 2020 makes one thing abundantly clear: we rely on a top-notch health care system to keep us healthy. And alive. The most important element in the health care system is simple. It’s the quality of people—and the quality of their training—that counts the most. So, come with us now to central California, to a town called Sanger—about 16 miles east of Fresno, in one of the most impoverished counti