Almost there...

Two down, one to go. Tomorrow is the consolation exam. The Clayton's exam. It's not really, of course, but it's difficult to avoid thinking of it like that. Unlike the previous two, tomorrow's test is not science-based. It's on cultural awareness and health psychology. Well, I suppose you could argue that psychology was science based ... if you were a psychologist perhaps. Snort! We kept getting these strange slides with circular definitions like, "Stress is the condition induced by a stressor. Stressors are the things that induce stress". Or, "The problem with the allostatic load theory of stress and disease is that there is no empirical evidence for it". Hard to take that too seriously.

Cultural awareness, on the other hand ... where to start? Perhaps by saying that I think that this subject is very important and trying to learn it rather than experience it seems futile, and trying to assess it by exam rather than assignment or clinical practice seems perverse. Nevertheless, I am sure that these sorts of issues have been considered by the faculty, and I realize that things that seem obvious and practical to an individual aren't necessarily easy to arrange for a class of more than 130 students. Oh well. I've resigned myself to writing a mediocre essay in the exam and passing. To be honest one good thing that came out of this subject is I actually bothered to read a book on the recommended reading list for the first time in my approximately 10 million years of formal education. It was a great book and I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it.

Read it if you think you don't understand the cross-cultural issues between mainstream Australia and Indigenous Australia. Read it if you think you do understand. It's down to earth, to the point, written by someone with years and years of experience of dealing with this stuff. It's called Why Warriors Lie Down And Die by Richard Trudgen.

As for health psychology, hmmm. Read Influence by Robert Cialdini. It's a beaut. No substitute for not turning up to lectures obviously, but much better for dinner party conversation.