Having spent most of my career in the private sector, I re-entered academic medicine several years ago and have enjoyed the opportunity to teach once again. After all, teachers are among the most influential people in our lives and it has been an honor to join their ranks.
A teacher does far more than impart factual information. In order to be effective, a good teacher guides students through the process of learning: how to acquire information, how to interpret it and how to apply it to their daily lives. The mechanism by which these goals are achieved is, of course, teacher dependent and some are more successful than others.
But the most vital aspect of teaching is the capacity to instill enthusiasm for a given field of knowledge. Looking back over my own education, I can easily name a handful of teachers who were especially effective in this regard and, it seems to me, it was their personal enthusiasm for the subject that infected me and other students. This quality, the essence of teaching, cannot be learned or fabricated.
