Paramedic Flash ad: Why my best students fail pharm 👆

Pharm is where I lose the most students, and it's never the ones I expect. It's the ones who can recite the dose of epi cold and freeze when I ask what it does to the heart. Last fall one of them came close to repeating my whole course, and it would have been as much my fault as his. His name is Devon. He was working full time on an ambulance and had a little girl at home, so he studied pharm the only way he had time for. He had over 400 terms saved on Quizlet and went through them on his phone between calls, EVERY shift. And he STILL froze when I called on him in class about diltiazem versus adenosine. He told me he'd get through the whole set, feel good, and by his next shift half of it was GONE. So he'd add more terms, which just meant more scrolling. When he asked me if he should change how he studied, I told him to keep drilling. Then he got a 63 on my pharm quiz. In our program you need an 80 on the midterm. You get one retest, and if you fail that you repeat the WHOLE course. A 63 three weeks before the midterm scared me, because I knew what failing would mean for him. Another semester of tuition on top of the $12,400 in loans he'd told me he already had, more overtime he didn't have time for, and even less time with his daughter. And if it came to that, I'd be the one who had to tell him he was starting over. That evening I walked past the skills lab and saw the lights still on. Through the window in the door I could see Devon sitting alone at a table with his head in his hands. I went in and sat down with him. He showed me his Quizlet, and every card was just a term on one side and a sentence on the other. "I know all of these on shift," he said. "Then you ask me in class and it's gone." I didn't know what to say. He'd done everything I told him to do. Two days later, a former student of mine, Chris, came back to help run our skills day. He passed my course two years ago and works as a paramedic now. On his break I asked him how he got through pharm, because I remembered he'd struggled with it too. He went out to his car and came back with a deck of flashcards. "These got me through," he said. "Reading words doesn't stick. You need to see it." It was nothing like what I'd been telling students to study with. Visuals and charts instead of walls of text, every med laid out the exact same way so your eyes go straight to the dose, the indications and the contraindications, and the med math drawn out instead of written out. He said he still keeps them in his car. He let me borrow them overnight, and I stayed up going through them card by card against our textbook. I didn't find one I'd mark wrong. The more I looked, the more I liked them. Every med has an organ on the front, so you know the body system at a glance. The deck even shows the needle insertion angles for the different routes, and the text on the back is color coded. Over the years I've learned most of my students are visual learners, and I remember reading a study years ago that found the same thing. Not every student learns the same way, and some need a different kind of study tool before the information actually makes sense. I'd been telling all of them to drill more terms. That's what Chris meant by "you need to see it." With these, they don't just memorize a drug. They can picture it and actually understand it. I ordered a set for Devon that night. When it came, I handed it to him after class and told him to put the phone away for pharm. He started going through the deck a section at a time between calls, and he'd tell me in class which section he was on. Med math was the part that scared him most, and he told me the dopamine clock card made the drip calculation click in like ten minutes after he'd fought with it for weeks. He got an 84 on the midterm. I'm not saying cards took the test for him. He told me he still studied every single shift. He just stopped spending that time scrolling and started spending it learning. He graduated with his class, and he didn't have to take out another loan. His daughter came to graduation holding a sign that said "MY DAD IS A PARAMEDIC." I took a picture of the two of them, and it's still on my desk. So if you're scrolling the same drug on your phone for the third time tonight, please stop. It's not you. It's how you were told to study it. I know, because I was one of the people telling you. These are the ones Chris showed me. They come with PDF guides for med math and peds dosing too, and they have a pass or get your money back guarantee, which is honestly why I tell my students about them now: paramedicflash.com/products/paramedic-pharmacology-cards