Teaching is Love

 From the 1/29/2021 newsletter 

 

Teaching is Love

 

 

Megan Schultz, MD, MA 

 

 

Dr. Schultz, who taught Spanish in an urban Baltimore high school before going into medicine, shares the story of the student who inspired her to become a doctor …

 

 

Before I was a doctor, I was a teacher. I taught Spanish at Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore for two years before I decided to go to medical school. It was one of my students, Torreantoe Smalls, who inspired me to become a doctor. Torry was mischievous, with a quick grin. He played the trumpet like nobody’s business and tried, sweetly and patiently, to teach my clueless, clumsy feet how to step dance. He once got a B+ on a Spanish exam, and even though he was just beside himself with pride, he made me swear up and down I wouldn’t tell anyone he had had actually studied for it. During his senior year, Torry was shot multiple times in the abdomen during an attempted robbery. He would ultimately spend two years and three months of his life in the hospital, enduring dozens of surgeries and losing nearly two feet of bowel. It was in his hospital room, staring at his small frame in the bed, surrounded by the clicks and beeps of machines, that I resolved to be a doctor. 

 

Fifteen years later, here I am: a doctor, yes, but also still a teacher. Instead of high school students, now I teach medical students, residents, and fellows. Instead of teaching people how to speak Spanish, now I teach people how to be doctors. This is a tall order; sometimes it’s hard to know what to prioritize. When I was in medical school myself, I often felt impatient and restless, like none of my professors really understood the point of being a doctor at all. They talked way too much about things like the Henderson-Hasselbach equationand not nearly enough about how to save the life of someone like Torry. And the way they taught! PowerPoint slide after PowerPoint slide, crammed with text in tiny font that I was expected to regurgitate on command. I have often thought that medical school would be far more interesting and effective if it were taught by good teachers who know nothing about medicine as opposed to good doctors who know nothing about teaching. But how to be a good teacher for medical trainees? How to balance the need for basic physiologic knowledge with broad themes of compassion and empathy? I decided to ask the person who inspired me to be a doctor in the first place: I decided to call Torry.

 

Torry is not Torry anymore; he is Mr. Smalls. He is now a teacher himself; he teaches percussion at Mervo High School in Baltimore. He is also father to three children and runs an entertainment company called TORKO ENT. He still has the mischievous grin – but the speed at which it appears has been tempered a bit by age and wisdom. I asked Torry what makes a good teacher. His answer was arrestingly simple: love.

 

Torry described the importance of love by telling me the story of Mr. Burton, his music teacher at Douglass High. Torry had met Mr. Burton when he auditioned for the Douglass Marching Band as a skinny 8^th grader – and from the beginning, Mr. Burton believed in him and acted like a father figure to him. “He was the first person to see who I really was,” Torry says. After he was shot, Mr. Burton regularly visited Torry in the hospital. One of the days Mr. Burton was visiting, he was asked to step out so the nurses could give Torry a bath. (For months, Torry could not move his legs, stand, or walk. As a result, he had to rely on nurses for sponge baths in bed, which he describes as a singularly humiliating experience. “You know, I’m cool, so I don’t want nobody giving me a sponge bath. But I didn’t have NO choice!” he says with that old grin.) 

 

Torry said, “This was when I knew Mr. Burton loved me as a son… After my [bath], after my visitors came back in, I was sitting there in bed trying to lotion myself. And I was so mad that I couldn’t move my legs, that I couldn’t reach my feet. The man took the lotion – I didn’t even ask him – he just saw me struggling.” And Mr. Burton knew what to do. The memory of Mr. Burton empathizing with him in that moment, selflessly helping Torry with such a basic need, still moves Torry to tears fifteen years later. “He made me feel that I was loved,” Torry says. 

 

To love our students – it’s not often something we talk about as teachers. But maybe it is love that’s the foundation of any successful student-teacher connection: to believe in our students, to know what to do when they are struggling, to help them without being asked. Maybe if we start from a place of compassion and empathy, all the basic physiologic knowledge will follow.

 

Without Torry, I don’t know if I would be a doctor today. I certainly wouldn’t be the same type of doctor. All my students in Baltimore taught me far more than I ever taught them – Torry is the perfect example of that. There is such beauty in knowing that he is a teacher now, seeing his students for who they really are, believing in them, loving them. Torreantoe Smalls: once my student, always my teacher. 

 

 

Megan L. Schultz, MD MA is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics (Emergency Medicine) at MCW.