During the eight-day autumn Jewish festival of Sukkot, those who observe it eat their meals in a temporary shelter called a Sukkah, partly as a reminder of the hasty flight from our lives of slavery in Egypt. At the start of the meal, we are invited to mention the names of individuals, living or dead, real or fictional, whom we would like to join us at the table, people whose lives and work we particularly respect and value.
Next chance I get, my invitation will go to Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a professor at Harvard Medical School. His writing about the world of medicine has appeared in The New Yorker for decades and his book Being Mortal about the complex decisions patients and doctors face at the end of life have affected my own thinking about death in profound ways.
I’ve wondered about his long absence from the pages of The New Yorker, but that mystery was solved recently when President Trump gutted USAID. It turns out that Gawande has been serving as one of the top officials of the agency for the past several years, not authorized to write about his work while in office. Now that Trump has cut him and most of his colleagues loose, he has been outspoken about the tragic loss of life across the globe that will result from the termination of life-saving programs, including food aid, HIV treatment and child vaccinations. If you want to be even more infuriated by what Trump has wrought, find his interview with David Remnick, The New Yorker’s editor, in a recent issue of the magazine or on its podcast.
It’s hard to imagine how Dr. Gawande’s wisdom might leave its mark on my work as a teacher educator, a field seemingly far removed from the world of hospitals, but when I read his piece in The New Yorker years ago called “The Learning Curve,” I immediately saw the connection. Gawande describes the situations in the operating room, working as the attending physician alongside a resident in training, where the more experienced practitioner must step aside and allow his greener colleague to perform the procedure, even though he or she is less skilled at it. That handoff of responsibility ensures the preparation of a future generation of capable surgeons.
So, where’s the connection to my work? Our teacher preparation program was built around the placement of residents (yes, we acknowledged the connection by adopting the medical terminology) in the classroom of a successful mentor teacher, whom we encouraged to gradually release more and more responsibility to the trainee. This is not easy for the veteran to do because it requires watching their charge stumble through activities in the classroom that the mentor teacher knew he or she could do better. We asked the mentors to read Gawande’s article and note the parallels to their own situations. In our discussions we explored their duties to the profession to engage in practices that would best produce a next generation of competent teachers.
I’ve been thinking about Gawande’s wisdom recently in yet another context outside of teacher education which I left behind with my retirement almost a dozen years ago. More recently, a former neighbor approached Rosellen and me for help with a memoir she was planning to write. She’s given us permission to write about this experience, but I’ll call her Sara to respect her privacy. We had only a sketchy sense of her past, but we had a sense that she had an interesting story to tell, so we signed on.
For more than two years, she has been sending us chapters as she completed them, no easy task because she was still busy with her work in a challlenging medical field until close to the end of completing her draft. There are 34 chapters in all, a tale as fascinating as we expected as she guided us on a journey from early struggle to the completion of medical school despite little support from family. Along the way, she survived toxic and dysfunctional relationships that made for painful reading, but by book’s end we find her, finally, in a happy stable relationship, underpinned by strong religious beliefs.
So, how does one best approach the mentoring role? This is Sara’s story and we must respect her ownership, even though there are many places where we would have chosen different language, added more detail, described her own feelings more deeply or structured the story differently. We tried to frame suggestions in those areas as respectfully as possible to encourage her to continue moving forward with her story. A heavy-handed mentor in the operating room or the classroom risks shutting down growth rather than encouraging it.
When I read the completed draft from beginning to end, I could see where she had accepted our advice and made her story deeper and more fluid. It’s not the book we would have written but it’s Sara’s story. She now faces the daunting task of finding an outlet that will carry it to a larger audience. That means there will be other voices suggesting changes, some not as delicate as ours.
We wish her luck and intend to help her find a publisher, but I’m grateful for the trust she showed in sharing with us the intimate details of a life she is proud of despite some really troubling choices and decisions along the way. And I’m grateful to Dr. Gawande for the insights his work brought to the complex relationships between mentor and mentee across many disparate areas of work and living.
