Collaboration

For our fetal pig lab, we had to pair up with a partner and share a pig to dissect. Being a grade 11 in a grade 12 course, I didn’t know many of my peers coming into the class. Thankfully Dylan was willing to be my partner on this one. When working on the exterior features portion of the lab, Dylan was the one taking initiative and keeping me in line, doing the majority of the work. By the time we started the physical dissection of the pig, we had started to get to know each other a little better, and splitting the work relatively evenly. Neither of us had much experience with a scalpel, and we fell behind the majority of the pack on the first day. The next day wasn’t much different, so we decided that we were going to dedicate flex blocks, lunch blocks, and after school time to finish it. It took a lot of our time, but we were able to get everything done except stretching out the digestive tract on the last day of class. We stayed after school for an hour and even though I made a few wrong cuts to the intestine, we got full marks for it. This lab taught me that communication and being on the same page as your partner all the time will enhance your results and if you split work evenly, you don’t have to do as much. I also learned how to properly use a scalpel blade and how to properly identify basic parts of a mammal. This lab was the most informative and most interesting to me over the course of the semester.