This week ended in a particularly thick nostalgic fog, thinking of my days as Ms.CollinsRoom204. Vivid memories of NorthtownLife are with me all the time, but this week was different. Despite some specifically teacher-ish experiences, I felt distantly removed from that former identity, and without resolution as I biked home from school this afternoon.
Realize that I have spent SIX YEARS of this quickly-fading decade at the sophomore-level. Mostly at the high-school level. 1999 witnessed the birth of my first sophomore year, and 2009 kicked-off my final second-year wise-foolishness. The first time around culminated in my 16th birthday, whereas the present one was welcomed by my 25th. It’s confusing and exhausting to wonder whether these milestones will become more or less frequent in life, but I digress.
This morning I carried out a lesson-ish-presentation on standard-yet-above-my-head topics, such as neuronal action potentials and membrane capacitance. WTF. I felt panicky and disoriented when the alarm went off this morning and I pictured ‘teaching’ to an audience who knows WAY more than me, and lacking the crutch of a HUGE developmental gap between them and me. This maturity-chasm is initially terrifying for high-school-teachers, but all of a sudden I realized how much teachers gain by having deeper abstract-thinking and emotional-reasoning skills than their pupils. Sounds obvious, but I suppose the grass is always Greener. Alas, the 20-minute romp through neurophysiology stretched by just fine, despite the disheartening sense of being out of practice in the craft I so enjoyed cultivating not long ago.
Across the quad, we started yet another new course on Thursday: Oral Radiology and Pathology. We are guaranteed that this will be the most practical course of our medental school career so far. Really. Heard that one before! Not to say they’re never “practical” (as if we ever get a chance to practice this stuff), but even a novice instructor should know that it’s one of the cheesiest buy-in-mechanisms they could possibly employ. Unless it’s a CPR class or HouseholdBudgets101, the pragmatism of MOST educational programming is generally low. Ok, enough educynicism, more reminiscing.
One of the most fun units I ever taught was “RADIATION AND YOU!”, which covers an intrinsically awesome subject area. It capitalizes with compound interest on adolescents’ morbid fascination with ANY application of the word MUTATION, especially related to future reproduction, as well as the more basic modern fear of nuclear-fall-out. No big deal. It even perfectly reinforces an understanding of atomic structure!!…nerd alert…
So, after sitting through 3 hours of medental school lectures on x-rays, all I wanted to do was rush home and flip through old binders of homemade worksheets on radiation. That’s a practical application of re-learning radiology, Dr.KiloVolt: reminisce the piss out of a mini-career-gone-by and the joys of creeping out teenagers with an understanding of a natural force that holds SO much virtue and vice to modern society. BOOM.
