All Doctors Should Teach
(Paula Cohen)
I have written often about the cluster of occupations that make up the “helping” professions: teaching, clinical medicine, nursing, therapy, and social work. These professionals help students, patients, and clients learn and become healthy. They are all teachers albeit in different settings.
Most important, these “teachers” in helping professions are totally dependent upon their students, patients, and clients to learn and get healthy. Regardless of the degree earned, annual income, and social status, these professionals cannot reach their goals without the cooperation, compliance, and involvement of those being helped.
Those who recognize this inherent dependency of professionals upon whom they serve have occasionally recommended that all physicians, nurses, therapists, and social workers become teachers before they enter the other helping professions. Here is one such recommendation for those seeking to become physicians.
Paula Marantz Cohen is dean of the Pennoni Honors College and distinguished professor of English at Drexel University and the author of Jane Austen in Scarsdale or Love, Death and the SATs. This post appeared in The American Scholar, September 18, 2012
My daughter, Katherine Penziner, wrote the essay that follows in response to my last column. She is spending a few years teaching in Southwest Arkansas as part of the Teach for America program. She plans eventually to go to medical school.
Every aspiring doctor should be required to teach a year of high school science. First, there is nothing more grueling than standing up, day after day, in front of hormonal and angsty teenagers who are having trouble controlling their attitudes. The emotional toll teaching takes can be exhausting–a perfect training ground for the taxing years of medical school we premeds are always hearing about. Still, a good day of teaching makes you feel good about yourself, and your students.
But what makes teaching most valuable for an aspiring doctor are the All Doctors Should Teach (Paula Cohen) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:
