As I start to put this blog together, I’m not sure how long it might be, could take a little while to explain so perhaps I’ll start here with a story.
Many years ago someone taught me the difference between education and teaching but sadly I can’t remember who that was. They told me a story (that’s really important because I think that education is based on stories).
The story is this…
A janitor in an all-girls school is getting fed up because the girls in year 11 have discovered lipstick and they have decided to start kissing the mirror in the bathroom to see if they can make ‘Marilyn Monroe lips’. This causes the janitor some amount of work as it’s difficult to get the lipstick marks off the mirrors and it’s happening on a daily basis.
The janitor it turns out is an actual educator and he goes to the head teacher to ask if he’s able to speak to the year 11 girls in the toilets and explains what he plans to do. The head teacher agrees.
The janitor addresses the girls in the toilet and explains to them the difficulty of cleaning the lipstick off the mirror. The girls laugh and snigger, not in any way understanding the frustration and the plight of the poor janitor. The janitor says that he intends to demonstrate to the girls how difficult it is to get the lipstick off in the hope that they will understand (more laughing). The janitor then takes a window brush from behind the cubicle and rams it down the toilet, he then takes the brush and cleans the mirror (from the toilet) and says to the girls “see how difficult it is to clean the mirror”.
The girls don’t kiss the mirror again.
There is teaching and there is education.
Teaching imparts knowledge, education changes behaviour.
And so, onto the longer part of the blog and it’s already too long.
In 1998 I was invited to speak to Vocational Trainees (now known as DFT’s) or in normal people language - newly qualified dentists.
I spoke to the VT’s in 1998 in my first year out of VT myself but I had worked for 3 years previously in the hospital service so in truth I was working as a newly qualified dentist but was in my fourth year post-qualification.
That said, I really had a handle on what it was like to be a VT and felt that what I could speak to guys about what quite valid.
I had the privilege of speaking to many, many VT groups in different places over the next 10 years before I was excommunicated.
I was banned effectively from speaking to VT’s after I left my own VT trainers’ job just over half way through a year after my bosses sold the practice to a corporate and I felt that I couldn’t stay.
I didn’t leave my VT in a bad position as I was a joint trainer but because I left half way through the privilege of speaking to VT’s was removed.
That was in 2008.
Somewhere along the line between then and now I managed to sneak back in because the people who had been responsible for kicking me out had left and everyone had forgotten.
My friend Jason Wong (deputy CDO) actually managed to invite me back in and about 3 years go we started jointly providing a dental implant lecture.
In the lecture Jason provides the ‘straightforward’ elements of dental implants and my task is to provide an introduction to complex dental implants but I’ve always seen speaking to newly qualified dentists as much more than a job of imparting bland information.
My lecture is 130 odd slides in 90 minutes and much of it is based on stories and personal stories both about dentistry and not about dentistry but mostly about leadership and ethics and finding parts of your job that you love because you’re going to be working for a long time.
I’m even able to tell the story of my friend Tim who died and Louis his son who’s now becoming a professional triathlete and how that was interlinked with my son fracturing his upper central incisor on holiday just days after Tim had passed away and how the dentist that I saw was absolutely wonderful to me because he could tell that I was in a bad place.
The risk is though that this type of talking to newly qualified dentists doesn’t fit the format.
The forms to fill out to be able to speak to these guys are terrible, let alone the forms to fill out to get paid (which is not a massive amount).
I feel like soon someone is going to tap me on the shoulder and say, “you’re not teaching enough dentistry”.
There is no question that newly qualified dentists need to be taught and to talk about dentistry, but they are never going to learn about complex implant dentistry in 90 minutes.
Perhaps if they learnt that if they were interested in complex dentistry it could make them happy in their careers to follow that pathway; understanding that it wouldn’t be all money and glitz and glamour but it could be a very, very fulfilling way of changing peoples lives and stimulating them in their career.
Perhaps they might be inspired by someone who was enthusiastic and enthusiastic enough to share personal information and stories about their own life and career in the hope that they might follow along.
Sadly, this approach does not compute in certain aspects and I suspect will not compute for a lot longer.
The choice then will be submit the aims and objectives, submit the learning outcomes, stick to the programme, don’t smile, mind your Ps & Qs and impart information, then the people who organize this will be able to go back to the people who organize them, who in turn can go back to the people who organize them and say “mission accomplished, information imparted”.
Teaching will have been done.
Will it have changed anyone’s behaviour?
Will it have made anyone better?
Will it have influenced a large number of patients in the process?
I guess this is the challenge for structured education in the larger form.
It turns out that Malcolm Pendlebury was right all those years ago, when I was his secretary and he was the president of my BDA group. Malcolm was a genius and as I was putting together his speakers and doing all of the administrative work for his presidential year (very shortly before he died in his back garden cutting his grass) I was complaining to him that the speakers would not fill out their aims and objectives forms and he explained to me “speakers of this calibre don’t have aims and objectives”.
I think now at last I understand what he meant.
If we don’t try to teach our young graduates about life and love and success and failure and resilience and heartbreak and the fact that it’s alright to get it wrong and to show them what has gone wrong and to show them that even though it’s gone wrong you’re still here. What else do we teach them?
Last Friday when I spoke to them I could have shown them a hundred full arch cases or a hundred sinus grafting cases or a hundred anterior aesthetic cases and told them that they were miles and miles and miles away from being able to do these under supervision let alone by themselves and what use would that have been?
What about showing them the glimpse of a place that’s truly marvellous, that they do have a ticket to if they choose to get on the bus.
I hope to teach young graduates for the rest of my career and I hope the rest of my career to be at least 30 years but perhaps 40 if I live long enough, I’m just not sure if I’ll be allowed.
Blog Post Number - 2529
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