Parenthesis

Everyone wants attention, and I am no different. Is this unusual? No. Does this mean we desire and crave for validation? Yup. Does it mean a teacher can get the attention all the time? You betcha.

I can't imagine the awkward way I was entering the lecture theatre this morning, with a big crowd facing me but walking in opposite direction.

A bitter welcome it would be.

I pretended to be oblivious to my students skipping my class. I kept walking - it didn't take long - and I overheard a few medical students teasing the title of my lecture: Communication skills. But hold on, I want to be clear, from the start, that I agree it's never a good idea to use didactic leacture to teach communication. I don't know how to make the lecture useful, much less how to make it interesting.

To eke out the most fundamental virtue of empathy, we can't simply teach the students "how" without the "why". So what, you might ask, can bring out the empathy? Simple: be a patient. If not, read more stories about illness. There are so many good novels or memoirs about illness. To give but one example: I finished a graphic memoir of a French artist who learned to accept her repeated seizures from a brain tumor. For a long time, she had been pretty messed-up with memory and lucidity, suffering from what people described as "spells of shaking". This story of an inoperable tumor would have been far better than my lecture to remind students to be empathetic.