The Teacher's Journey
I was attending a conference recently where the participants were asked to reflect on their clinical training and one voice said “Pain, humiliation and embarrassment!” There was dead silence in the room. The speaker was a senior physician, one who was known to have had a long and successful family practice, yet there was so much emotion in those three words that I was transcended into the life of a young man thirty years in the past.
I could hear his teachers saying “Well it worked didn’t it?” and on some superficial level it did work. Like an abused child learns to answer the abuser’s questions, this young man learned to duck and cover, learned to placate and learned to fight back from a distance. He swore to never treat his students the way he had been treated.
I don’t know this physician well enough to speculate on whether he was successful in his oath to treat students better than he had been treated. I spend a lot of time thinking about how we are the product of our experiences both in the automatic using of teaching techniques that we liked and in the verbal rejection of those we disliked. I hated droning lectures when I was young, but I find myself falling into that pattern even though I know better. I become the abuser; it’s a pattern that I know, a pattern that comes easily with little forethought if I’m stressed or short on preparation time.
The teacher’s journey begins with a goal, a desire to improve or change something.