The Learning Portfolio

This was a comment that i left on Pat's blog, but i liked it so much I've decided to turn it into a post.
The learning Portfolio is a piece of assessment universally hated by all med students regardless of creed, colour, socio-economic status, gender or any of those thigns we've been taught influence health. Tt was a chance for us to sit back and think about

what we'd learnt, what difficulties we'd had, how we could do it better, how the stuff we'd learnt about could be put into an exam format, the ethical implications of things we'd learnt, how much we'd like to graduate, how we balance our social and work life with our medicine life, how our medicine life should take top priority, what type of medicine we were thinking about doing later, where we were going for a placement, why we were going there, what we should do on a placement, what we did on a placement, how we could do our next placement better, current medical developments we'd been researching and their implications, the long-term effects on society of certain interventions, whether or not we feel that we are healthy, whether or not we feel that Australia is healthy, how we could improve the standard of our own health, how we could improve the standard of the community's health, how we felt about results we weren't getting, and how we could perform better in the medicine course.

As this was only worth 10% of our grade, every med student's answer to the last point was "Don't do any of the above"

Well, some of you must have noticed my silence for the last two days, so I guess I should tell you what I've been up to. Following on from Pat's comment cursing me for being finished, here's the events you should be cursing me for.

Starting with the END of my EXAMS at 11:23 on monday morning, I spent the afternoon playing Kingdom Hearts II, a game which is pure awesome but sadly not very challenging, and then it was off to Mahya's Birthday party at Cactus Jack's Palmer Street. After a few hours of gorging and socialising, it was off to the clubs! Molly Malone's was great once we'd convinced the DJ to play decent music. Kurt, you will be interested to know that they played sexyback. No-one else will be, but you will.

Made my way home at about 2am and went to sleep for about 8 hours before it was time to get up and catch a ferry with some other med students off to Maggie. We stayed at X-base, spent the afternoon lazing on the beach/rock-climbing/taking photos, before the crew from Getaway turned up and the full-moon party (despite it only being a half-moon) got into full swing. Sadly no amount of bribing/begging/getting-sophia-to-dance-and-flirt-with the DJ could make him play anythign anywhere near decent, so we spent most of the night stealing the free McK bourbon they were handing out. It tastes like rubbish, but it was free rubbish. Unfortunately it was being handed out by one of those girls who....you know those girls who hand out free stuff? The ones where the job interview is "What's your name" and to be successful they have to giggle 8 times, twirl their hair and smile while saying it? Well she was handing them out, and everytime we went to get one she yelled "What's it's called???" in the tones of someone failing dismally to appear cool to the youth market. Think a cheerleader spouting "Make-up-your-own-mind" ads and you'll have an idea of what we went through, and why we stopped drinking the free stuff. She wasn't a very generous cheerleader either; only gave you a mouthful per free cup. I gave up on alcohol and went back to coke.

Eventually the free-alcohol-and-in-my-case-coke-induced sugar rush brought us to the beach where we sat singing loudly trying to drown out the dodgy DJs music. I amazed everyone with my knowledge of every part of Bohemian Rhapsody, before making our way back and killing time until 2, when we went to bed.

Finally left the island at 11:15 this morning, after sleeping through all of the earlier ferries, missing the bus and eating far too much cold rock than is good for us. Thus was one of the greatest two-day holidays ever finished, and all the exam stress I'd managed to build in the last 3 weeks completely obliterated.

We should really try this sometime guys! Next on the agenda though: Laura's Party!!! See you all there!

Joe

It's Over!!!

HUZZAH!!!!!

3 DOWN!!!!!

NOW I CAN SLEEP!!!!

Although really all it'll do is give me more time to run through people's dreams. Still good though.

Which Superhero am I?

You are Superman
You are mild-mannered, good,
strong and you love to help others.



Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz


I've always known it I guess. By the way, Superdickery have been misrepresenting me for ages now, but unlike certain other heroes (I'm looking at you Batman), I can take a joke.

Procrastination Again!

http://www.superdickery.com/ Is a great website. You can't go past it for distractions and procrastination. Unless you're heading past it to say, my blog. Which would direct you to superdickery anyway, so ...it's a vicious cycle.

In other news, everyone's been blogging about dreams lately, but at least they've had interesting ones. My dream last night consisted of me studying for Gastro.

In a dream

I STUDIED in a DREAM. I need a break.

And now to the weather: The outlook is fine tomorrow for Laura's 18th, however, there will be a slight scattering of afternoon exams on thursday for Emily's.

Finally, I'd just like to say that even though Laura knows exactly what i'm getting her, she will be blown away by how good it is.

Wouldn't it be nice...?

Yes, it would be. In fact, it is. How do I know?

We won. To put it simply, Laura and I went shopping, paid for a lotto ticket, and fate was smiling upon us that day. $40.60 BABY!!!

Ok, so it's not quite as nice as the $13,000,000 would have been, but we're in shock just from $40.60! $13,000,000 would've killed us!

So Laura and I have decided to split the winnings on another lotto ticket and a couple of tickets to see "Borat". We'll invite a bunch of you don't worry, but we can't promise the money won't change us. You'll all have to dress up nice so we don't look like we're slumming it, and we'll talk in posh* accents.

After all, we're lotto winners now.

*Please note: POSH is actually pronounced as though there was an 'a' in there.** It rhymes with POACH.

**There actually is an 'a' in there, but poor people can't see it.

Lookalikes!

GRAMMAR NAZI!!!

The difference between "There", "Their" and "They're". The term "There" indicates a location, as in "Over there". "Their" is a possessive term meaning "The item in question is the property of more than one person", for example "It is their dog". Finally, "They're" is a contraction of the words "They are", as indicated by the apostrophe where the 'a' used to be. It means exactly the same thing as it's longer version.

The difference between "Than" and "Then". "Than" is used to indicate a comparison between two things. For example, "I like chocolate more THAN vanilla". The term "Then" is used to indicate a link between one part of a sequence and the next, as in "Ben cut open the bottle of topping, THEN ate the topping".

The difference between "To", "Too" and "Two". Seriously, how can people not know this one? It's even easier than the Than/Then thing. "Two" is a number, as in "Two shoes". "Too" is exactly synonymous with "As well". These are the only times you use these two homonyms! The rest of the time, you use "To", which by the way preceeds a verb. "To run," "to walk," "to be, or not to be".

Sorry just had to get that off my chest.

XMas

Well, I'll do pretty much anything to put off studying, so I've decided to jump on the "(Non-Denominational Summer Celebration) is coming" bandwagon, along with every department store and shopping centre in Townsville (and Ben - check his blog). Of course, I can't refer to (The Holiday in Question) because of political correctness, but we all know the one I'm talking about. It featured a kid who was raised in a barn, some very expensive presents, and that guy in the red suit.

So here's my list:

An end to studying and exams (Kind of self-fulfilling that one, but I'm guaranteed to get it)
A monkey-powered fridge stacked full of chocolate
My mysteriously missing Goodies DVDs.
An entourage, like the ones celebrities have. I'm not sure what they do, but I'd like a bunch of people following me all day fussing over my every need.
A haddock.
Someone to notice that the tagline for my blog changes everytime I update it. It's the little things, people!
World Peace (obligatory piece of well-wishing)
One of those machines off The Matrix that can teach me martial arts in about 8 seconds.
A Real Shoulder Angel and Devil. Little versions of me in the get-up that sit on my shoulder and debate endlessly about what choice I should make.
The ability to Travel through Time
An Aardvark
A Tank
A room with a door that leads to the same room you just left. Imagine the Conga lines!

That's about it for me. Enjoy SWATVAC. May your exams be easy and your answers correct.

Random

Ben and I have been procrastinating, and we think it would be so much cooler if the world was run by Dolphins with mechanical legs, laser-cannon arms, bicycles and zombie pirahna soldiers.

That's all I really have to say about that. On another note, Dion's apparently being lectured on "Professional Experience in BEd". I didn't think you'd need a p r o f e s s i o n a l for that Dion. Surely you could find someone willing to do it for free?

Has anyone noticed that in the Rogue Traders song "Voodoo Child" that the line "Here the come the Drums! Here come the Drums!" is immediately prior to a section with no drums. Am i just not hearing it properly, or is there in fact a complete absence of drums in that song?

Med Fact of the Night: You can differentiate between a Femoral Hernia and an Inguinal Hernia by following it up to it's origin. If it originates above the inguinal ligament, it is an inguinal hernia. If it comes from below the ligament, it is a femoral hernia.

What does it mean???

A puzzling quote from one of my fellow medders:


"I got you the best present Joe. its really cool; you'll love it. But i cant give it to u until after exams or you'll get all suicidal"

What the hell does that mean? Any ideas?