Dissections, taught at the bench.

Most dissection courses are a textbook full of diagrams with a specimen bolted on at the end. This one is the reverse. Every week is built around a technique you perform at the bench — handling the instruments safely, making a clean and careful incision, then locating and naming a structure — and the reading exists to support that work. That is what "skill-led, not textbook-led" means, and it is the single most important thing to understand about how this course runs.

The course is organized as a two-day rhythm: a Concept Day where the technique is introduced and demonstrated up close, and an Experiment Day where it becomes physical (the tray set up, the specimen opened, the structures identified and drawn) and gets written into a real lab notebook. Between the two days, the student reviews at home, and that gap is where the skill actually consolidates.

Mastery is the progression rule. A student advances through a technique when they can perform, explain, and repeat it cleanly, rather than advancing simply because a week has passed. "Developing" is the honest, expected default; "mastered" is earned and demonstrated. The rubrics are the instrument that makes that judgment fair and repeatable.