grand rounds

Grand Rounds, like the Carnival of Teaching, always make me feel like those times in a coffee shop when I overhear compelling words from the next table: can I listen without tipping my chair?

We're invited to Grand Rounds, though, and it's a gift to listen in on what is -- often -- intimate and close talk, on what is figuring-it-out in words, out loud. Nurses and doctors quietly write -- well -- about what confounds, moves, or angers them.

The latest Grand Rounds, on "The People behind the Medicine," is about nurses and doctors making quick decisions about their professional roles as they treat others -- or are treated by others. The posts make me think about decisions we make as teachers about the self-consciousness we have toward students, about how we decide how much to open ourselves to the people in our classes and how much to stay at a distance, all depending on what we think is happening and needs to happen. I cannot imagine what it is to be a nurse in the Periodic Intensive Care Unit, and I am inexpressibly glad that my decisions can't so directly kill someone. But I know we can make others miserable or exalted. We don't need the education doctors get in how to live and think after someone has died under your knife or prescription -- but I would like beginning and continuing education in how to be alert to how much our teacherly ways with others matter, and in how to acknowledge that -- as with medicine -- the luminous right decision toward one person is not for someone else.

What would a Hippocratic Oath for teachers look like?