Hearing the Heart Beat

Last year, in my second level class, I held most of the lab time for the end of the semester. This was due partly to my own reservations about how the class should be structured and how I would handle 30 students in a less formal setting. This year, I knew to break-up the monotony of academics with hand-on exercises and how that would help the students to persevere through the more academically challenging material. So starting the second week of school, the students were in the lab using scales and stethoscopes. This week, a few lab groups have progressed to the point of attempting to take blood pressures. This is a fairly complicated skill and one that takes a good amount of practice. It can easily be discouraging for a student to observe me doing it and even after multiple repetitions themselves not be able to hear the pulse sound that determines blood pressure. It's that point, when they are teetering on the edge of giving-up, that I stepped-in this week and said, "Let's do it together".  The student and I used a training stethoscope so that we both could hear, and I took the volunteer's blood pressure. I gave a hand signal to signify when I heard the pulse sound beginning and ending. When the students could hear along with me, and then tried again, they could more often hear the sound for themselves. It's that moment, when their eyes light-up, saying in a facial expression so much more fluently than words, "I heard it, I can do this." that makes me say to myself, "Today, I was a teacher."