Before my ABSN program, I had never really used or heard the word "didactic." They use it to describe part of our curriculum. Part of it is "clinical", meaning hands-on learning at the hospital or in skills lab or simulation. But the other part of nursing school is DIDACTIC. You have to read research articles, textbook chapters, read case studies and answer questions, and then sit in lecture classes and discuss what you've read. When we discuss nursing in class, we always have these sessions where we brainstorm about patient care. Given 20 minutes of discussion, we come up with an exhaustive list of patient needs and how the nurse can meet those needs or advocate for those needs to be met. Which, of course, is often impossible in a real clinical setting where the nurse is managing 4 patients.
A lot of people have said that nursing school and actual nursing are very different and that the first year of practice involves more challenging learning than in school. That is why I'm glad I chose an accelerated program. To be blunt, I can get the didactic stuff "out of the way" so that I can more quickly move to the hands-on experiential learning.
I've learned a lot about myself in nursing school. I am a hands-on, experiential learner. I could sit and study normal lab values for 6 hours and retain maybe 30% of the information. But as soon as I have 1 patient with abnormal lab values, I remember the information forever. For me, 1 experience is worth about 10 hours of reading/didactic learning.
And so much of nursing can not be learned in class or in a book...
