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Studing turns into teaching. My life is consumed, to a reasonable degree by the study of voice. First, however, I spent many years in a programed learning mode: grade school, middle school, high school, college, med school and residency. Early on though, I had a try at something different when I started a science fair project.
My father, not a taskmaster, but not one for idleness, could find many jobs for the young; mowing corn fields, painting barns, even painting black tin roofs in the summer. However, at age 15, when I began to build a wind tunnel to study the effects of wind on trucks, I was somehow relieved of manual duties and logged a great many hours designing, building and testing with a wind tunnel.
Time was the key ingredient; the biggest gift. I was given the time to let my mind wander, to ask and to try to answer questions. For a while after that, I settled back into the routine of being a regular student (not completely, I did a lot of independent study in the rest of high school, college (philosophy of science) and medical school (sign language and deaf culture).Then I tried out a regular job. It lasted for a number of years, but soon I found myself studying again, calling up doctors, visiting and observing - learning something new.
Now that I have been practicing voice as a medical specialty for the past four years I find my emphasis changing. Every patient that comes in is still a question. What is really wrong? What can I do better than before? What might I be missing? This disorder seems like a pattern. Lets try something new here.
Baltazar Servin emailed me one day from Mexico city. He asked, "Could I come and study with you?"
I spoke with my mentors, I set some requirements and one day he showed up.
Now the role I had played for much of my life was reversed. I was a teacher.
I do teach and enjoy first year medical students. I lecture to singing teachers, practicing physicians and speech therapists. Now I have had the opportunity to teach my first love, the study of voice.
Really the gift of being a student is the time that you have to wonder, to ask questions, to write and consolidate your thoughts. When you are a one on one teacher, you get a touch of that gift again. You teach and you are a student at the same time. You wonder about your own consistency. You try to view your self anew. Am I consistent in my actions and my words?
Teaching seems a part of life. It is the stage given to me now. My web page teaches when I am asleep as thousands of other computers download pages from my server every day. At least I get email daily suggesting that people are learning from it.
Baltazar is in his last year of residency in Mexico City where his wife is an opthamologist. Much like myself, even though medicine is quite advanced, there seems to be incredible opportunities for people who want to go beyond the ordinary. Baltazar shared sith me the state of laryngology in Mexico while I just did what I do every day - seeing patients and elucidating their vocal problems. For me, Baltazar added a lens for me to see problems in a new light. How can I not only discover what is going on in this patient, but can I pass along how my mind is getting from one place to another?
The three months he spent here rewarded me as we talked between patients, in the car to surgery, after work. How would he make this work when he returned home to Mexico? What equipment would he need? How could he do it less expensively in Mexico?
I continue to take off an afternoon a week to teach first year medical students (which to grade, write reports and read papers ends up being much more than the hour of class each week - I suspect you teachers out there knew that already).
Being the invertate student, I spend a half day studying French, piano and learning to do new computer things or edit video.
If I quit all of these things, I could bump my salary up by 20%. I don't. I lead a richer life, the life of a student and of a teacher.
Even though I have left the university, I have been able to do daily what is rewarding to me, perhaps more so than at the university.
During Baltazar's stay, we shared more than the study of voice as he and his wife, touched snow for the first time in their life on Mt. Hood. We stood at the coast at 3 am on the way to a fishing trip (Baltazar had mentioned there were no salmon in the rivers in Mexico) and gazed up into a sky perfused with stars (there is not much dark sky in Mexico City). I star watch and was awed by the intensity and number visible. We hooked and lost the big one on that salmon fishing trip.
The girls and I camped out on the back porch many nights. In August, we stayed up late and watched the Perseid meteor shower. Parenting is really nothing if not teaching. This teaching is well worth my time, at least at my stage of the game of life.
Children, med students, fellows. My life is filled with teaching.
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