Kahneman in the kitchen

Last week I mentioned that my boyfriend, Jed, is in vet school. One of the great perks about this is care for my dog, Honey, without having to set foot in another animal hospital again or pay another vet bill. In March 2018, I took her to our vet and was pretty determined that would be the last vet bill I’d pay. This week, the vet school offered free heartworm medication for a year if you had proof from your pet’s annual check up or a blood test that it was heartworm free. Unfortunately, Honey’s last heartworm test was too old to use but we decided Jed could probably draw her blood and do the test himself (urged by me, who didn’t want to find a vet in Ohio or pay for this). So, Tuesday night we found ourselves on the kitchen floor with the dog, ready to draw a little blood for the heartworm test. It is worth noting that the vet school doesn’t have first year students practice any skills on live animals, so until Tuesday night the only blood draw Jed had ever done was taking saline solution from a stuffed animal’s plastic vein. I felt confident in his skills though and restrained the dog while he located her vein. He was feeling less than efficacious about the task of drawing real blood from my real (and squirmy) dog, but his System 2 was focused and in control. He knew what the task demanded: find the vein, insert the needle, draw the blood, retract the needle, apply pressure to the vein. He had practiced countless times, albeit on a fake patient, and I’m happy to report that he executed all those steps perfectly. Except one thing, the actual last step which comes after applying pressure to the vein… transferring the blood from the syringe into a vile. And this is where System 1 barged in. Unfortunately, drawing saline solution from a stuffed animal never required that next step of doing anything with it, so the students usually emptied their syringes on the floor, at each other, or into the trash. And so, as soon as the blood was drawn and the needle was out of the dog, Jed automatically did just that. Drops of blood spattered us and the kitchen floor and we just kind of stared at each other for a few seconds before he responded to look on my face and said, “oh, oops… that’s what we always do.”

After we laughed for a minute and cleaned up the blood, we talked about how crucial it is to learn and practice skills authentically. Although I’m fairly sure he will never make that mistake again and it was a great learning experience, it made me think a lot about instances in the classroom where we teach skills out of context. We might think we have taught something fully when in reality we have not provided students with the “big picture” or given them the ability to apply what is taught to their own lives. I find myself pondering how we can replicate or at the very least relate real-world contexts in the classroom so that learning experiences transfer appropriately to real-world experiences.