Results are in!

And I did well! And that should mean that I stop complaining and feel all chided, because aw shucks, I did well, and that forgives the two weeks of my life lost to this class, right?

WRONG! If anything, doing well now gives me license to say what I like because it can't be construed as sour grapes because I failed CPH or something.

I will modify this by saying again that the guy forced to organize the course at the last minute and a couple of the revolving profs really did try to present the information, but the course was tossed together in 2 seconds with less finesse than an Oxygen reality television show, and it showed; oh man did it ever show.

With the exception of about half the instructors in CPH, I'm noticing more in second term that when I think about *problems* with SGU, or when I think "Gah! Caribbean medical school!", in the end, it is very rarely the actual caliber of the instruction or the quality of the facilities that has me feeling the No-Go-American-School-blues. It's the administrative runaround last minute never ending busy work, with the creation of this class being the perfect example. The real, planned courses, while they may have a dud professor here or there, or an unfair test question here or there, from what I've seen from feedback from American medical schools, the quality of education here is pretty damn good.

And really, that's what's important since last minute administration woes (aka, my first week back in Grenada) are incredibly annoying, scream-inducing, and sometimes tear-inducing, but so long as I get a good quality of education, that's the most important thing.

But back to bitching about this class, because holy shit, ya'all. And I'm from California. It takes a LOT to get me to say "ya'll/ya'all".

Administrative: Clinical Skills got disappeared like a mob stoolie despite it being on the master schedule and despite us doing a unit (or half unit, I can never remember) worth of work last term, that often encroached on things like study time, sleep time, or oh yeah, histology lab in another stunning moment of administrative planning, and though I got a nasty email last term about missing a couple patient interviews (which granted, are useful), Saint Paparo (Histo head) just gave us all 100% attendance points and tried to work it so that people could be in other labs so there wasn't a completely unnecessary conflict between labs.

Brilliant. So all for nothing though, because goodbye Clinical Skills! So we get the modified lecture schedule with the new class, CPH on it, with a professor introducing its inception (oh, and we had scheduled classes for clinical skills before any announcements, so we found out we didn't have to come back for class or workshops because a student went to the clinical skills office to find out what was going on with whether there was a lecture) with obvious irritation at having to do this with no warning.

Apparently those two week classes, like again, parasitology and genetics, actually take time and energy to prepare. Who knew? Oh wait... anyone. We swiped some of the MPH professors along with some rotating (grad students?) which causes me to now feel a degree of overwhelming sympathy for the MPH students that I never felt before.

Bye bye clinical skills point with your P/F-ness. Hello, suddenly graded class that's inexplicably worth as much as parasitology and genetics, thus if you do fail it, you get to explain to a residency board someday why you can pass hard classes but love smokers and hate minorities so much you can't pull off community health.

But you know all this.

About half the lectures were absolute racist, one-sided, unscientific garbage. The clinical case was a joke that featured a character so stereotypical that if she'd appeared in a movie, people would be howling that the director was a racist, and she was supposed to be indicative of the problems with addressing racial issues in the MEDICAL profession, yet they picked a case where the medical response had absolutely nothing to do with the prologue or the epilogue and was solely based on the patient's panoply of awful choices. Somehow this was relevant yet "Guy keeps eating ho hos despite warning until you have to cut his foot off" is not an issue about the horrors of the medical profession's discrimination against heavy people. Shrug.

And the smoking... I know now TWO people who had quit smoking who started smoking AGAIN during this class because it was hashed on so damn much that it revved up their cravings. So it's official... Studying community health gives you cancer. I can make up statistics and everything. (BTW, though I hate smoking, despite not wanting to be told what I SHOULD vote for concerning people's freedom to hurt themselves with impunity, a bunch of those smoking statistics did not add up and I suspect are not well supported, plus if half the people who smoke are going to die eventually from tobacco use, all that tells me is that you have a pretty good life expectancy if you smoke since something else didn't get you first)

The exam had to give back 4 questions, which seems like not that many (biochem gave back 5), until you realize the exam had 40 questions. Yup, 10 percent of the exam unfit... and these were not histology throwback points with "Well, you should have known it, but you all didn't do well on this question and I'm incredibly awesome" points... no, these were "excuse me, but this question doesn't actually have a correct answer" points because you screwed the math on two of the most important measuring criteria for population screening, which actually is an incredibly relevant concept. And why do I know that? Because I learned it in parasitology. Parasitology is actually the best community health education you'll ever get.

So I challenged 4 questions, which I suppose was nice that I knew the material well enough to know that they weren't right. The guy next to me challenged 6; a friend challenged 5, and there had been a couple I'd considered challenging but didn't want to raise my hand again for another slip of paper.

Speaking of skewed math, the syllabus had us required to bring a calculator to the final exam... which we subsequently were not allowed to take in, thus sparking a "and next time leave them" (also cell phones, which I think some people were trying to use for calculators)... which I would have if I hadn't been told to bring them in the first place?

So yeah, that's the last verbose bitch on CPH I'll post, but if anyone's wondering why the unnatural level of anger, it's sort of like... you know when you pay to see a movie so bad that you no longer want your money back, but you want that two hours of your life back (*cough* WICKER MAN *cough*)? This was a two week long Wicker Man... except Nicholas Cage has never screamed at me for an hour about smoking... and I'm pretty sure if he did, I'd be allowed to hit him in the face, which is discouraged here.