On Teaching

and being taught

When I was eight, I wanted to be a race car driver. (I lived in the Indianapolis media area, where listening to the Indy 500 on the radio was a Memorial Day tradition; also, I had read a book about Mario Andretti.) When I was eleven, I wanted to be a nuclear physicist. (I didn’t have any clear idea of what a nuclear physicist did, but I liked math and science and “nuclear physicist” sounded less childish than just “scientist.” Also I had seen “The Day the Earth Stood Still” on Sammy Terry’s Nightmare Theater and was taken with Prof. Barnhardt.) But somewhere in the middle of high school, I decided I wanted to be a teacher.

I was one of those kids who loved being in school. The end of summer vacation filled me not with dread but with eager anticipation. I could pick up a pen again. I got a bag full of new books again. I could ride the Number 12 school bus, driven by a farmer I had known since I was five years old. That was my experience of school…a place where I belonged, and had direction, and a purpose. I could imagine no higher calling that making that happen for the young people who came after me.

But no one encouraged me to do it. They all said: “You were made for more than this.” Every teacher in that high school discouraged the idea – firmly, and often. Their reasons were many variations on “you can aim higher than that.” I probably should have been more interested in why my favorite teachers all had such an unflattering view of the profession they had chosen, but fifteen isn’t a prime age for forensic empathy and so the what stuck much harder than any why.

So I went off to college with no clear purpose in mind, majored in telecommunications and economics, worked for a bit in audiobook production, decided I needed more education, got into a graduate economics program and…spent four of the next six years teaching undergraduates. And I loved it. At first I just pinch-hit for full professors but soon they entrusted me with sections of intro microeconomics, and then history of economics, and eventually I was the department expert on big data and teaching multiple sections of mathematical economics to not only econ undergraduates but crossovers from the international business master’s program.

But I was approaching the end of my PhD and the academic job market was worse than tough. I had a couple of university interviews but no offers. It turned out that of all the things I learned to do during those six years, the marketable skill was computer programming. I’d gotten in at the beginning, I had a natural aptitude, and that’s who was hiring. That’s where I went.

Yet it seemed that no matter what the job description was, within a few months I’d been placed in the role of teaching other people how to do what I knew. Or I was positioned to be the interface between the incomprehensible geeks and the clueless management and/or clients. I had a good run as a technical writer/editor —I had a natural intuition into the pitfalls a consumer of the product would experience, and managed to coax the techs to cough up enough engineering info and had the skill to turn it into a user guide that minimized anguished help desk calls.

(I also made a name for myself as the only living human being who could decipher the handwriting of the director of the Regenstrief Institute and thus made possible most of the forward progress of both HL7 and ASTM E-1238 in the 1990s, because otherwise everyone would have been poring over his illegible scribbles and emailing “Huh?” to each other.)

I still make the bulk of my living that way (and it’s a stupidly good living…I can’t believe what they pay me to do this)…teaching researchers and government employees how to leverage vast data warehouses collected as a byproduct of administering Medicare and Medicaid to study health outcomes and care disparities and evaluate the hundreds of demonstration projects that are always underway.

But…I do this other thing, which fortifies my soul and keeps me grounded in what is important and meaningful.

I have FAA certifications as a private pilot and an advanced ground instructor. For years I have led a formal ground school, coaching 10-15 student pilots at a time to pass their FAA written exams. A few weeks ago, I was asked to do some one-on-one preparation for a prospective flight instructor candidate’s checkride. I had never done this before – I am myself *not* a flight instructor, just a ground instructor. And…

…the candidate is profoundly deaf.

It was time for the teacher to become the student.

The first thing I had to learn was how to listen to someone who has beaten her head against the walls erected against her by the FAA. She has had *remarkable* success and accomplished much, and it has all been while fighting against the headwinds of the federal bureaucracy. By the time she came to my attention she was already a commercial pilot with a multi-engine rating and a fair amount of aerobatic training. She is a *way* better pilot than I am. But everyone, from her primary flight instructor to the chief flight instructor of the flight school to the FAA designated pilot examiner…questions whether she’s up to this task.

This sounds stupidly melodramatic, but I wonder if there is some way in which every ‘teaching’ impulse I’ve ever felt compelled to pursue was preparing me for this moment. This woman’s dream, for 20 years, has been to get her instructor rating so she can teach other deaf pilots. She’s gotten 90% of the way despite everyone telling her she couldn’t do it. My dream, for 40 years, has been to teach. I keep teaching, even though everyone has told me I’m not a teacher and it would be stupid for me to want to be a teacher, even though they keep paying me to teach.

I think maybe we were meant for each other.