Guest Lecture #2

A big thank  you to Professor Deborah Graham from the Psychology Faculty of JCU  and her assistant Annemarie Theuma, Cairns Campus Officer of the JCU Student Association, for presenting our second guest lecture for the the “Thinking Month” in the National Year of Reading calendar. It was before the holidays in March, but the key messages linger.  All who attended were impressed by Professor Graham’s passion for the power of positive thinking. We appreciated how the study of psychology can not only help us in our everyday lives but that a psychology degree can lead to a wide variety of career opportunities.

Did you know that people think negative thoughts about themselves 80% of the time! Imagine if we could all become more aware of our negative inner dialogues and correct this universal trait? We’d all be world beaters!  The words of Marianne Williamson spring to mind:  

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. … It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Photography Helen Burton – Helen is our school media officer

To find out more about psychology, view these neat psychology podcasts for secondary students.  To learn more about Psychology at JCU  scan their website.  Read one of the top 11 Psychology books published in 2011.  You don’t have to buy  them, you’re bound to find most of them at the local public library.  Browse the Cairns Library Website online and reserve your copy at the Smithfield Branch. If you are not already a member of the Cairns public library – you should be.  Our school can’t afford the hefty subscriptions to journal databases of bigger academic institutions but by joining the local public library you have access to all the electronic databases on their website and those to which the State Library of Queensland subscribe – all from your own laptop or home computer.  There are tutorials on our school Resource Centre website which help you to apply for your online access to these State Library databases. Other Cairns Library Online Databases don’t require more than your regular library card number, BUT you must be a member of the Cairns Public Library.  For the databases that the State Library of Qld subscribes to, you need to apply for a  QPL account but you can be searching these databases in minutes so long as you have a local Cairns library card. So drag one of your parents into the Smithfield branch with some documentation confirming your residential address and sign up. 

Some of you are thinking –Why bother, I can google it – but anyone can write anything on the web however, journal articles are peer reviewed by experts. Your assignments will shine for containing expert information. You can also access free online tutoring after school via this membership.  You simply need your free library card. As a Queensland citizen these privileges are  yours for free – so why not take advantage of them?

 SSHS is a corporate member of the JCU library. You are able to browse the journal article collections of JCU by visiting the public OPACs on the first floor and downloading full text journal articles to your USB drive.   You can browse the holdings of JCU both print and journal databases by visiting JCU One Search.  So you don’t have to leave your home to collect the details of journal articles you would like to view.  Tutorials are available on our school library website to show you how, but just as library staff if you’re unsure. Many good articles can be found in Deep Web databases, which we have bookmarked in our Diigo library.  Highwire is one such journal database (Stanford University where the WWW was created) and you can often find not just abstracts to lead you to the full text at JCU but often free full text articles.  Lastly, for articles about the most “hard to get” topics, I can usually find something using a .PDF search engine like www.openpdf.com      Google, is OK for a general overview but by including “directory” in the search string and locating some subject specific databases you can  drill down and do vertical searches for substantial information. Good luck finding some scholarly articles on the Deep Web. Google Scholar and Google Books can sometimes give you some clues about texts and chapters of books which you can source at one of our local public or academic libraries.