Teaching can be a blast! I say this not with sarcasm, but from the honest perspective of a doc in private practice, privileged to instruct residents and med students, where I'll not infrequently employ off-beat methods--some skirting the edge of political incorrectness--all for the purpose of enhancing one’s medical education.
The teaching of future doctors by practicing physicians is a tried-and-true tradition of medical education, a practice dating back through the ages, where those without formal education in the art of education taught. It has continued through the development of medical schools and residency programs even to this day, where much teaching--including formal lectures—commences by the doctors within and without the institution, even the residents and the medical students themselves. I certainly had no formal training in didactics or the art of oration, nor was taught the proper methodology or techniques of classroom presentations. We sort of learned it on the fly, starting early in med school where we periodically gave short lectures on medical topics in a classroom setting of 15-20, using drawings marked onto transparent celluloid and an overhead projector (okay, I’m dating myself, but this was before the age of Power Point, and color film slides were out of reach for cash-starved med students). This carried on into residency where we prepared and delivered hour-long grand rounds lectures to an auditorium of larger audiences. Acting as teachers ourselves was part of our education.
Medical learning transpires well beyond the books and lectures and labs, and entails a full-on dive right into the heart of patient care, particularly in the clinical years of medical school and while deep in the throes of residency.
Yet, time-honored didacts and lectures are still vital in supplementing the clinical experience. Lectures are usually narrowly focused to bring to light up-to-date concepts relevant to clinical practice, knowledge that may not be readily appreciated while deep in the mires of real-world medicine. As one may surmise, such science-driven and fact-saturated lectures can get a bit numbing, leading to undesirable effects such as boredom and somulence.
A few oft-used teaching methods to strike attention and forge into memory are: humor, the more hilarious the better, often including the “inappropriate” sort; dirty or obscene mnemonics; shocking pictures and videos (I vividly recall the lecture on parasites and human copulation—two separate topics--during our first year of med school), and so on. Yeah, we were trained to become respectable doctors, but anything within grasp to keep much-needed concepts locked in our heads was—and still is—paramount.
This is where creativity in one’s work comes to play. Doctors, even those not practicing in an academic center, are often asked to give didacts (in the form of lectures) to their residents and medical students. Didacticism itself is a philosophy that emphasizes instructional and informative qualities in a work, including literature or art, a term derived from ancient Greek. As such, I view lectures as an art form.
To this end, I add a bit of entertainment to the material, the same canon I hold when creating these blog posts and in educating patients. I usually do my own artwork, using drawings I’ve done before (e.g., for this blog) or create new ones. I’ll use case presentations of patients I’ve treated (maintaining their anonymity of course), a common practice amongst teaching physicians, but I’ll add some nuance specific to the patient, something she/he did or said that was moving or funny or outrageously outlandish which adds color to the presentation but also humanizes the subject matter. And I often use photos taken during surgery or in the clinic setting.
The hodgepodge of lecture slides displayed at the beginning are a few examples.
All of this takes a bit more time, but the process itself is absorbing and the delivery is a real blast, at least for the presenter. Yet all in all, this is just another example of making your occupation more enjoyable by bringing creativity into your work.
©Randall
S. Fong, M.D.
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