I think the term “Necessary Evil” was invented to describe Anatomy & Physiology class. That tough class (and extremely unreasonable professor, I might add) made me want to pull my hair out, slap the smile off the dumb skeleton hanging in the corner of the classroom, and bury my smelly, half-dissected formalde-pig in the landfill without any ritual last rites! Yeah, it was that hard.

But in order to become a legitimate mortician, I had to have a passing grade under my belt. In fact, I had to have two…wait, make that FOUR… passing grades. A&P 1, Lab 1, A&P 2, and Lab 2. Talk about overload! That means I had to devote 12 college credit hours of my young adult life to bones, and muscles, and nerves, and organs, and glands- all spoken in some crazy dead foreign Latin language I’d probably never use again. All of the pronunciations were tough, but the memorization was much more difficult. If you’ve taken A&P, you probably know what I mean. If A&P is on the slate for your next semester, you’ll soon find out and join our ranks.

My clients are gonna be dead, I thought.  I don’t need to know how their glands used to work. I’m never once going to say, “Jeez, I’m glad I know the Infralaryngeal structures of the respiratory tree…” while I’m embalming or cremating somebody.

That disrespectful thought crept through my mind only because I was naïve and extremely frustrated. The class was, in fact, essential to my success as an embalmer. I see that now, but it was difficult for me to justify the heavy A&P workload and stress at the time. There were times I wanted to quit, and I wasn’t alone. About half of my peers dropped the class when they saw the initial grade reports. But I stuck it out and got it done.

But my A&P nightmares were relived earlier this year when I watched my husband struggle with the same Anatomy and Physiology woes. In order to complete his Paramedic Training, A&P is a must. I watched helplessly as he wrestled with the class the same way I did-

• Hours of endless studying only to be discouraged
• Wading through the muck of foreign, hard-to-say words
• Trying to memorize a seemingly endless list of terms
• Reading, and reading, and reading but not retaining the information
• Trying to cram information to pass a test and forgetting everything in order to move on to try to pass the next test
• The frustration of knowing that you’re working as hard as you can, but getting nowhere

He worked his butt of the try to pass that class and get his Paramedic training done, only to fall short of the grade cut-off in the end. The man has been a Firefighter/EMT for years and is very good at his job, but that unforgiving Anatomy and Physiology class did him in and cut his career goals short.

My current boss, who was the head professor of a Mortuary School for 14 years, told me about the option of an Online Anatomy and Physiology Course. It isn’t designed to replace any institution’s formal A&P class, but it is specifically designed to help students learn the Anatomy fundamentals and the Physiology essentials the right way- the easy way -and prepare them to enroll-in and pass their required A&P class.

I thought it was a good idea, but kind of shrugged it off and forgot about it. That is, until I saw it mentioned on The Martha Stewart Show. That’s when I thought, Hey there might be something to this new online approach.

I’ve written this not as a rant (even though it sounds like it right now), but as a resource for other Anatomy and Physiology students that need help making the grade. You can learn from our mistakes. I made the error of passing the class of as ‘completely unforgiving’ and not worth my time. So, I only put out the effort to scrape by for a passing grade instead of learning and retaining the information. My husband made the mistake of being easily discouraged and giving-up.

But you, my friend, don’t have to fall into the same traps we did. Here’s the deal, the A&P teaching methods used today are the same ones used decades ago. Terms, names, endless memorization… who needs that? Who learns like that!? No me, that’s for sure, and not my husband.

That’s because we're learning it wrong.

That was our big question. Would the Online Anatomy and Physiology Course actually help my husband and give him the confidence her needs to re-enroll in the A&P class to pass the Paramedic program? After awhile, we decided that since his career and our future are on the line, seeking this sort of specialized help is definitely worth a shot.

Since it felt like he was taking such a big chance with an online product, I decided to get involved and stick by his side the entire way. Besides that, I was curious to see if it actually did the job.

At first glance, I thought we were going to get some booklets and CDs in the mail and have to lead ourselves through the course at home on our own. But that wasn’t the case. All of the information was quickly downloaded to our computer and we were quickly on our way to becoming A&P geniuses!... or so we'd hoped.

I’m not going to get into too much detail, because this page is already longer than I wanted it to be and because if you are already involved in an A&P class, then you know what school and lessons are like. So, I’m just going to hit on the important points of our experiences with the Online Anatomy & Physiology Program:

• The information is presented in a very uncomplicated way, yet at the same time, you don’t feel dumb like they’re ‘talking down’ to you (make sense?)
• Instead of dealing with a clueless instructor, the diagrams, photos, and interactive software helped us learn-by-doing, and that made us remember the lessons easier
• Unlike a formal class, we could work at our own pace and move on to the next lesson whenever we were damn good and ready- that was a plus :)
• I found the program to be more ‘medical’ based with lessons in chemical interactions and drug therapy- which was great for my Medic husband, but not really that necessary for a Mortuary Science practitioner like me
• I was kind of annoyed by starting from the ground up, but I soon realized that I’d forgotten a lot of information since college! From then on, I used my husband’s program as a refresher course and saw just how important anatomy is to my job
• After getting used to it, we were flying through the learning modules much faster than we would have been in a normal classroom (and we were actually remembering the information, too)

But I think the best part was this…

• After completing the quizzes, we got thoroughly explained, understandable answers to the questions we had to complete. That certainly helped with information retention.

So, now that we’ve taken a chance and discovered this incredibly helpful resource, we wanted to get the word out and help other students that are going through the same crap we had to endure. If you are struggling with Anatomy & Physiology, please don’t be afraid to take advantage of this innovative online program. If you can point and click, you can learn… and learn easier, faster :)

CLICK HERE to learn more about the Online A&P Course to see if it’s right for you.

I hope you’ve found this page to be helpful and I wish you the best of luck in your educational endeavors. Just remember: Anatomy and Physiology doesn’t have to be the big scary monster everyone thinks it is. You can, and WILL learn it!

If you want to learn more about completing an Online Mortuary Science degree like I did, CLICK HERE.