Unit 5 Reflection

This unit was about the Digestive, Endocrine, and Lymphatic Systems. Metabolism was included in there with the digestive system to go further into how the body uses the nutrients it gets from food. These systems seem rather unrelated but of course everything in our body is connected some how and these all have to do with our bodies digestion and absorption of nutrients, the control of the hormones in relation to using the nutrients and sending them to all the right places and the waste from cells being carried back to the blood stream to be filtered out. The Digestive System is a much more complicated system that we are led to believe and takes much longer to complete than I thought because of the vast size of the organs. We did a lab to estimate how long our digestive systems were from mouth to anus and I was surprised that mine reached all the way across our class room measuring to be about 964 centimeters.
After learning about the digestive system we went into detail about the metabolic system and how our bodies use the energy stored. There are three different states the body can be in when using the body's  stored energy: the fed state, the fasting state, and the starving state. We learned the path of all the major molecules from ingestion to where ever they will be used.

Next we learned about the endocrine system which definitely was the most complicated in my opinion especially because of having to memorize what hormones come from what organs or glands ad what is their purpose. An interesting bit that I learned in this section was that epinephrine and adrenaline are just different words for the same hormone, so all this type of teachers switching between the two and myself not realizing they were the same chemical. 

Finally, the last section of this unit was about the very mysterious lymphatic system which everyone has heard of, but never really understood. The lymphatic system has three major jobs: immunity, lipid absorption, and fluid recovery. It is made up of a clear fluid called lymph traveling around the body in lymph vessels to remove the waste from body cells and bring them into the blood stream to be filtered out. The fascinating thing about the lymphatic vessels is that they start at the capillaries move up to vessels and to the lymph nodes that are filled with lymphocytes to kill foreign invaders. 

The most challenging thing about this unit was keeping everything strait and making sure that I associated the correct organs and hormones with the correct system. Now lets check back to see how I'm doing on my goals for this semester. I said that I would be fully prepared for test and start studying earlier than the night before and to get more regular sleep. I have achieved neither of those two yet, except the sleep one for a couple days maybe. Even with the best intentions, my lack of motivation trumps any will to study or sleep. Now that I have had to think about all of this stuff again I am going to put more effort at least into the sleep goal so that my life is a little healthier.