August 2009

While searching for humanities syllabi to beef up my understanding of what a humanities instructor teaches, I also found several interesting syllabi for medical humanities. These struck me as particularly relevant for the health sciences course, so I am posting them here.

First, I found an interesting syllabus for Narrative Medicine and Medical Humanities. I think that this would probably not be relevant for a course I would teach at the community college level in humanities, but it would be relevant for my health science professionals freshman English class.

Areas for which a project can be shaped include:
Empathy
Empathy and consciousness
Physician-patient relationship
Cross cultural medical issues and needs
History of medicine
Literature and medicine
Art/photography and medicine
Medical training and medical school curriculum
Reflection and reflective practice

Literature and Humanities is an excellent syllabus with literary works related to medicine.

Session 1: January 22 (snow date January 29): Betrayed by the Body
Robert Murphy, The Body Silent (memoir)
Chris Adrian, “A Child’s Book of Sickness and Death” (story)
Lucia Perillo, “Poem without Breasts,” “Second Poem without Breasts”

Session 2: February 26 (snow date March 5): The Wounded Healer
Abraham Verghese, The Tennis Partner (memoir)
William Carlos Williams, “Old Doc Rivers” (story)
Veneta Masson, “Guilt” (poem)

Session 3: March 26 (snow date April 2): Endings
Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death (memoir)
David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death (memoir)
Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” (poem)

Session 4: April 30: Battling Despair
William Styron, Darkness Visible (memoir)
Jane Kenyon, “Having It Out with Melancholy” (poem)
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Sonnet 65

Session 5: May 28: Agents of Death/Angels of Mercy: Social Stigma and the
Individual Conscience
Atul Gawande, “The Doctors of the Death Chamber” (article)
Jim Shepard, “Sans Farine” (story)

Session 6: June 25: Compassion and Connections in the Hospital
Thomas Moran, The World I Made for Her (novel)
Chris Adrian, “The Sum of Our Parts” (story)

This is a discussion of another medical humanities class. Again, I think this would be very useful for the health sciences English class.

Week 1 topics:
How does the transition from student to professional (professionalization) occur: objectification of the body, responsibility vs. inexperience, instruction in “professionalism” vs. the hidden curriculum
…
Session 1. Introductory session uses poetry and art to introduce topics of cultural ambiguity (“Day of the Refugios” by Alberto Rios, “Original Sin” by Sandra Cisneros), borders between physician and patient (“Talking to the Family” by John Stone, “Open You Up” by Richard Berlin) distancing of the sick from their own health (“Across the Border” by Karen Fiser), isolation (Edvard Munch’s paintings Death in the Sickroom, The Dead Mother).

Arbitrariness of borders, the Other: one-page excerpt from Edward Said’s Orientalism.

Session 2. Objectification of the body as students become acculturated while learning gross anatomy through dissection. Anatomy of Anatomy in Images and Words by photojournalist Meryl Levin traces this process with photographs and student journal entries. Secret knowledge not previously available to the lay public. But now this knowledge is public: Gunther von Hagens’s Body Worlds exhibit.

Student response to gross anatomy course: poem, “Apparition” by Gregg Chesney. Intern trains herself to be detached: poem, “Internship in Seattle” by Emily R. Transue.

Historical perspectives on objectifying and learning from the body:

the dead body — Rembrandt’s painting, The Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp)

the living body-Eakins’s paintings, The Gross Clinic and The Agnew Clinic

development of technology (“Technology and Disease: The Stethoscope and Physical Diagnosis” by Jacalyn Duffin)

Compare representations (paintings) of physician-patient interaction: The Doctor by Sir Luke Fildes and Picasso’s Science and Charity.

Patient’s perspective of objectification and loss of personhood: poem, “The Coliseum” by Jim Ferris

“Professionalism”: Jack Coulehan critiques current curricula in medical professionalism and discusses the hidden curriculum. “You Say Self Interest, I Say Altruism.”

Difficult transition and ambiguous boundaries when medical student officially becomes an MD. Playing the role, assuming the role. Short story by Mikhail Bulgakov, “The Steel Windpipe”and Perri Klass’s introduction to Baby Doctor and essay from Baby Doctor, “Flip-flops.” Klass’s essays include reflections on the interaction of personal and professional life and lead into Session 3.

Session 3. Physician perspectives on the overlap and conflict of personal and professional life; subjectivity, objectivity

Poem, “Falling Through” by Michael Jacobs.
Essay, “Language Barrier”. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie.
Essay, “Heart Rhythms”. Sandeep Jauhar.
Story, “Laundry”. Susan Onthank Mates.
Poem, “Monday”. Marc J. Straus.
Poem sequence, “The Distant Moon, I, II,III, IV”. Rafael Campo.
Essay, “Fat Lady”. Irvin D.Yalom

What is the difference?

And why is a faculty posting asking for the résumé instead of the CV? What are they looking for that’s different?

I made myself depressed looking at an academic résumé online. The professor (whose work I knew) has twelve pages of single spaced publications.

Update: When I found anyone talking about it at all, the presentation indicated that a résumé was 1.5-2 pages and the CV was as many as you could fill up.

So I threw out stuff wholesale and got to a 2-page résumé. Hopefully they will be interested enough to contact me.

I saw an opening in Humanities, which called for a degree in one of several fields, including English. Though I am unsure what exactly the teachers would be teaching, besides literature, the job gave me a new direction to send my CV in.

We shall see.

And I have finished all six of my syllabi, though I have to admit I just finished putting the final touches to the new prep today. Why do I do that when I tell my students not to? Regardless, they are finished.

Now to go and present them.

A friend wrote the following on my Facebook page:

My problem at work is I write my company email too technical. They want me to tone down the verbiage. That can be hard if one email is directed to an engineer and then copied to the marketing division.

My suggestion was:

One suggestion is instead of copying the marketing division, you could send them the email, with a header and explanation.

The customer asked for a different program because his needs were not being met, based on his work in water because he grows rice. The following was sent to engineering:
blah blah blah.

This is an interesting issue and I don’t think I have seen it discussed per se in the business texts I have taught from.

Has writing come full circle in our technologically advanced world?

Cables used to be only 140 characters, according to Jack Devine, a CIA agent who spoke on C-Span today.
Twitter is only 140 characters.

Email replaces both memos and letters.
This is why many people have different expectations for email. I learned email as a replacement for memos. Other professors seem to have learned it as a replacement for snail mail, which we certainly emphasize in our use of the two terms email and snail mail.

Updated due to a comment on the obtuseness of the post. Sorry about that.

I read blogs today and found many that were relevant to education and my life. While I can’t see making a post out of each of them, because I don’t really have time to comment substantially, I do think they are worth looking at.

This probably deserves its own post. Right Wing Nation has a blog post on how to be a good teacher.

Reassigned Time is talking about office hours. As an adjunct, I don’t have them at one school and do at the other. If I have them, though, students come in for help.

Critical Mass has an article on general education and college.

What colleges and universities are missing, with all their emphasis on endless student choice–with the sheer volume of trendy, cute, or aggressively trivial course offerings; the avoidance of core content-based requirements; and the sometimes-cynical, sometimes-naive focus on skills over knowledge–is that students are hungry for intellectual anchors. They want to read the great writers, study the major historical events, examine the most lasting ideas and powerful inventions. They are delighted when they happen across the opportunity to do that–but they also tend, quite understandably, to lack the wherewithal to self-style courses of study that offer that. That’s what requirements and college counselors are for, after all.

My son is a mathematics major and is taking an environmental history course which required nine (9!) books. Not little wussy ones either. Honking big texts. He wanted to take Revolutionary Russia but it was limited to majors only. I don’t know how he’s going to do in the environmental history course. I hope he does well.

Right Wing Nation has a blog post on the lowering of standards of research in academia. It is not a study, but an anecdote. Nonetheless it is interesting.

The Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece on why snobbery is the bastion of the liberal arts major. I don’t think that’s who is snooty, but maybe that’s because I am a liberal arts major.

Stephen Zelnick writes of poetry wars with his students at Minding the Campus.

His side of the battle is this:

I told a student her interpretation of a poem was wrong. From that moment I was regarded as an enemy to freedom.

I invited my students to engage with me in online debate on whether an interpretation could be wrong. What follows is their side of the argument. My arguments failed to dent their belief that a poem means whatever a reader thinks.

For their side, read the whole Poetry Wars article.

The New York Times has an interesting article (from 2004) on business writing and email issues.

“E-mail is a party to which English teachers have not been invited,” Dr. Hogan said. “It has companies tearing their hair out.”

A recent survey of 120 American corporations reached a similar conclusion. The study, by the National Commission on Writing, a panel established by the College Board, concluded that a third of employees in the nation’s blue-chip companies wrote poorly and that businesses were spending as much as $3.1 billion annually on remedial training.

This is one of the reasons that being able to write is so important. As a good writer, an employee is more valuable.

So that’s what I’m going to be working with this semester. Two of my classes are geared towards making employees better writers.