That vodcast I linked the other day in my presentation - I have been watching it on my iPod and I am more relieved than ever that I was born in this country. Although I wouldn't have minded being Swedish or even Belgian, I'll gladly settle for being a socialist in this country, too.

Watching this shit just makes me so sad! The United Corporations of America can't help but put their fingers in every pie. Seeing health care approached as a business is just so wrong to me. Of course people are going to get substandard care, if they can't afford to pay for better. Of course for-profit health insurance companies are gaining profit at the expense of the health of their customers. Where else would those dollars come from? How can this be allowed??

And yet, I hear American opinions that socialism is potentially the worst thing that could ever happen to them. (Well, maybe communism is a little worse.) But as I understand it, government regulation regarding universal access to health care is not so much socialism as it is humanism.

Now, now, I'm not trying to get all up on my high horse and say that universal health care is not without its flaws or that no one slips through the cracks.

Yeesh!

(end rant)

Which reminds me, we got our mark for the presentation today - 13 marks out of a possible 15. Not too shabby! One of the criticisms was that we should have all talked equally. Yes, I guess she noticed me covering for the Slacker.

So the slacker came to class today with a skit for us to do before our presentation. I was in the middle of setting up the slide show, and the other girls were busy getting their content and activities ready. She handed out folders to each of us with our lines... 15 minutes before we were due to present! She had even brought props and costumes and everything. One of the more assertive girls basically said, "Yeah, thanks, but... no." You could see how deflated she was, but I was a little glad (horrible, I know!) that she had actually done some work even if we weren't going to use it. In the end I had to do her slide content for her because she neglected to email me. Again.

Anyway I had spent a solid hour last night before bed rehearsing my slide content and how I would introduce it. This preparation is a first for me, normally I get so consumed with the presentation that I forget to actually practice what I am going to say! So I talked to myself in the mirror and told me all about unions. I have to say, I felt super self-conscious at the beginning but what a difference it made! Usually during presentations, I get red and sweaty and experience involuntary GI contractions. Man, today I was absolutely rocking the presentation. Coupled with the other two girls, the three of us really knew our shit and pretty much blew the prof's mind. Or, that was the general impression we got. I'll take it!

We gave ourselves 10/10 on the self-evaluation (even the slacker gave herself 10, but... meh) and for once I really felt like I deserved it. I am so glad that we are done. I think we set the bar pretty high, and that's all I wanted. We will know our mark later this week, hopefully.

In other news, my English Lit. prof is ghastly. I love to read, write, and understand literature, but this class is bringing back awful memories about why I hated English in high school. Honestly, who cares what your interpretation of a story's theme is, or style techniques that you perceive the author used? I often wonder, what if the authors wrote their stories with absolutely NO UNDERLYING THEME and just meant for them to be a story? Why does the author have to be "arguing a point" in everything? It's also a little sketchy because she, like, over-reads into a piece and finds all these little nuances that no one else can see. I just kind of mentally check out at the door - the class is seriously a waste of time. Especially because it seems highly irrelevant to nursing! I can just picture myself 10 years from now, starting an IV or drawing up a syringe and thinking I wonder what the central theme is to that memo that my manager sent out this morning? I should have a look for any uses of imagery, irony, or perhaps foreshadowing that we will work yet another week short-staffed. Yes, this class is definitely worth paying tuition... *cough*

Anyway, I popped my presentation up on Youtube if you want to have a look. Because I'm in copyright v. fair use paranoia, you can find the references for the content below. The video at the beginning has Woody Guthrie's "Union Maid" playing, which is a folksy bluegrass-type song. It didn't upload because of the DRM protection, but it's there on the real thing :) Let me know what you think.

References available upon request :)

We just met up for our semi-last group discussion, went over the slide content, and made some adjustments. Everyone was awesome about thanking me for putting together the presentation. It was really nice of them, but I'm a huge control freak so I took that on purpose. I hate it when people are using Powerpoint like it's the first time and fill it up with ugly transitions, clip art (or distorted clip art, aaargh!), and strange audio clips. Not many students have discovered that Keynote is, like, light years better than Powerpoint will ever be, so my presentations always look bitchin' even when it's straight out of the template and took me an hour to throw together.

I went a little above and beyond on the Keynote (as I am wont to do)  and found a fun hack for pulling video off of YouTube and importing it directly into the slideshow. Honestly, considering how much Apple and YouTube are in bed together, you'd think that would be a thoroughly integrated feature. Actually, it's a huge pain in the ass. The program works pretty well though, it automatically finds the .flv Flash video file from the website, downloads it, and re-encodes it as a .mov Quicktime file, which is compatible with Keynote. It's nothing you couldn't do yourself with a little know-how and a Quicktime Pro subscription, but it saves time and money. My only complaint is that the audio is lost. For my presentation, I used a b&w video of railway workers in the 30s and played Woody Guthrie's "Union Maid" intro over top. It goes very well and I'm happy with it.

One point I was re-iterating with my group again and again was that slideshows alone do not make good presentations. How many times have we watched presentations where the group just gathered around and read off the slides with their back to the audience? How effing boring is that? I can read for myself, thanks. I REALLY pushed my group to come up with something creative to have as filler. We left this task to the slacker because he seems fairly creative. Surprise, no content! So now we are just like every other group with a slideshow that we will read verbatim. Hopefully he will come through with something fun by Monday morning. If not, I'm going to try and add in some additional fun content to the slides so that it's not completely lame.

I just put in an order for a new iPod touch/Macbook (which is no surprise to those who follow me on Twitter!) and I'm hoping to have the new computer in time for the presentation on Monday. Two days ago it was in China, yesterday in Anchorage, and today in Tennessee (um, ok..?) so it should be. My old iBook doesn't have a remote so you have to hit a key to change the slides, and it runs so s-l-o-w-l-y that sometimes my transitions don't happen when they are supposed to. Here's hoping, anyway.

Other than the whole group project thing that is consuming me, I made the mistake of going away to a house party out of town last weekend. I don't drink often (last time was last year, I'm pretty sure) but I was in the mood to party. We all had an uproariously good time but what it did was waste the one day I have to recharge my batteries. We were up all night and then I went to work on Sunday, and straight into the school week from there. The extended hangover/sleeplessness killed my study drive and I spent Sunday and Monday's study time doing absolutely dick all. Watched TV and ate a tin of smoked mussels... that was pretty much it. Result being that I am behind on all of my readings and I had tons of work to do on this presentation anyway! 

I'll be glad once this is presentation is behind me. I'm pretty stoked that we are going first, so that all of this shit wouldn't be piling up right at midterms or something! It's always harder to get something done when you have all the time in the world to do it. Well, that's true for my procrastinating self, anyway.

So far, nursing school is way more intense than my years in police or design studies. Part of that is because I'm actively trying to learn the material instead of spacing out during class and then cramming later. But honestly, the only class I can compare the pace of A&P to is a design history course I took, which, at least, was spread out over 2 semesters. A&P is 6 hours a week, crammed in to one semester. I really wonder why that is, given that I will be in school for another 4 years...? The pace is so fast that the profs aren't teaching the material, so much as they are just reading it out loud off of the projector slides.

I think the competitiveness of nursing school is directly related to the course difficulty. A minimum high school average of 80% (letter grade B/3.0 GPA) was required for entry this year. 1275 students applied, and 186 were accepted into the program.

Compare this to my last two programs, where the minimum average was essentially a high school diploma or GED. The profs did not take for granted that we understood anything, really, so they went through and explained everything the way you might remember in high school.

However, I think that since you have to have good study habits and have cognitive abilities in order to be accepted into nursing, the profs take advantage of this and hit the ground running with course material and pacing.

Now, I'm not complaining. If given a choice, I'd rather be in a class too fast for me instead of a class too slow. It keeps me engaged and an active participant, and keeps me motivated to keep up.

It's definitely different than I'm used to... I'm just sayin'. :)

One last thing to note: I've read a lot of student nurse blogs over the past year, some from start to finish (they are now nurses). One thing that jumps out at me is the content starts out strong and frequent at the start of their blogging but tapers off to maybe once or twice a month (or less) later on. I know from having kept journals before, it can be hard to find the energy to write something, anything, but before you know it the chance to write at all is gone, and you're left at the end of some big event without much to show for it. I don't want that to happen to my blog.

Therefore, I am committing that even when the week has been crazy, crazy, busy and all I want to do is hide somewhere, I will blog at least once a week.

There. I said it. Now you can hold me to it.

Picture my surprise when every one of my classes this year is ALL OVER Blackboard. I'm getting e-mails, updates, and additional course content every 30 minutes. I didn't realize this until during all of my classes today, when I hadn't done the required readings and didn't print a copy of the slides to bring to the lecture. Oops! The best part was I asked a girl in the class where she got her notes from and she gave me an oh, you're slow look and said "Do you know how to use Blackboard?"

It will be interesting to see how this heavy Blackboard usage plays out for me. Over the last 2 days, I have spent probably 2.5 or 3 hours just navigating to, downloading, and printing required lecture material. It takes a lot of time, really. The program is a little clunky so navigation isn't as fast as it could be, and then I have to wait for the full lectures to download, and then convert them into PDFs if they aren't already. Oh, and the printing. Printing at the library costs $0.25 per page... just today, I have 20 pages to print. So I print at home on the 'use as little ink as possible' setting, and I'll try to sneak some in at work tomorrow. Next year I should apply for a grant specifically to cover printing costs... it will definitely add up!